Harry Talbott News Today

The Gazette published news of Japans surprise attack on Pearl Harbor — and the more than 2,000 killed and 1,000 injured — on Dec. 7, 1941. It is a date

Pearl Harbor/Camp Carson/Colorado Springs Army Air Base

At first glance, it’s easy to assume that Ross Talbott chose to pursue a different direction in life than being part of the family fruit-growing business in Palisade. After all, Talbott moved in 1959 as a young man to the New Castle area, where he ended up building Apple Tree Park, a trailer park that became home to more than 1,200 people, making it, at one time, about twice the population of New Castle was then. But if you stop to think more closely about the community’s name, it hin...

By GREG WALCHER I couldn’t help thinking about my friend, the late Harry Talbott, this week when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) designated nearly 300,000 acres as critical habitat for the yellow-billed cuckoo. Harry was a conservation icon, not only because of his leadership in preserving Palisade’s orchards and open space throughout the region, nor just because of his work in founding the rural agricultural land trust movement, as crucial as those were. He was more than a...

Where would the Grand Valley be without the Colorado West Land Trust? Peach grower Harry Talbott has said he doubts there still would be a peach industry here if not for the work the trust has done to preserve productive orchard land from development. If that was the land trust’s only achievement, it would be worth celebrating. But it’s done so much more in the 40 years since it was started by Palisade farmers. It has conserved roughly 125,000 acres of land stretching from the Bookcli...