Property developer Ronald Boeddeker and his wife, Kitty, were never interested in hunting.
But one day in 1991 they found themselves at the Safari Club International’s hunting convention in Reno, Nevada, accompanying Kitty’s brother Matt as he explored booths. Adrift in a sea of camouflage apparel and buck knives, Kitty wandered into a small realtor’s stall, where she saw a collection of ranches near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, listed for sale.
“She showed them to my dad, and he was, like, ‘Well, we’ll take a look,” recalled Cary Krukowski, the duo’s daughter, in a recent interview. “But we went there on an initial trip just to look at it, and he was, like, ‘Huh, something must be wrong with this place, because it’s too good to be true.”
After sending out a team of surveyors, Boeddeker, the founder of the Santa Barbara-based Transcontinental Corp., which developed Lake Las Vegas and the Waikoloa Beach Resort in Hawaii, bought the combination of deeded and leased acres— more than 200,000 in total— for what Krukowski estimated was in the “tens of millions” of dollars.
“It fit all the criteria,” she said. “Not too far from the West Coast, near a ski town, and with a lot of water.”
Rocky Mountain Fly Fishing, CMR style. pic.twitter.com/wTN6uddeo1
— Cross Mountain Ranch (@Crossmtranch) August 30, 2017
The family improved upon— and expanded— the property, Cross Mountain Ranch, over the next 25 years. But after Boeddeker died in 2010, Krukowski and her siblings dispersed across the country. “It just got difficult to spend as much time as we wanted there,” said Krukowski, the president of TC Entertainment, a Denver-based concert promoter and event manager.
Faced with the burden of managing a piece of property 15 percent larger than all five boroughs of New York, the family put the ranch on the market for a clean $100 million, listing it with the Mirr Ranch Group.
Settling In
When they bought the land in 1991, there were only a few extant structures, most of them falling down. “There was the main headquarters, which we called Willow Creek, along with a house and a barn that was quite old, from the 1900s,” Krukowski said. There was also an old Victorian house, and—after they added an 8,000-acre parcel in 1992—the land came to include an historic stagecoach and mail stop.