On an August morning, in a meadow beneath the rugged spires of the Glacier Peak Wilderness, nearly 60 people celebrated the public purchase of a popular hiking spot in the Cascades. One speaker recounted how a young girl contributed her 75-cent weekly allowance toward saving the swath of old-growth forest and alpine scenery known as Spider Meadows.
Another piece of the background was not mentioned — how Seattle land buyer Mike Mitchell parlayed a $50,000 investment in the Spider Meadows parcel, north of Lake Wenatchee, into a quarter-million-dollar profit, sending conservation groups and the U.S. Forest Service scrambling to buy it before the chain saws arrived.
Mitchell is a wilderness speculator, a New West version of the quick-footed investor who once bought land in the path of a freeway. He specializes in purchasing property others want to preserve for the public, betting he can resell it profitably to government agencies or land-preservation trusts.
Mitchell says he was a bit disappointed he wasn’t on the guest list for the Spider Meadows dedication six weeks ago. But it was hardly a surprise: His back-country deals have earned him a wary reception among environmentalists and public-land managers from Washington to Colorado.
Mitchell’s holdings currently include a 160-acre mountain in the middle of Washington’s largest state park, property that park commissioners have long craved.
He purchased a section of timberland and lakefront on the doorstep of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, betting taxpayers would buy it as part of the proposed Mountains to Sound Greenway. He’s made unsuccessful bids for thousands of acres of forest and wildlife habitat sought by conservation groups in Montana and Colorado.
Mitchell insists his business, Wildlife Land and Holding, is driven by the same desire for natural preservation that motivates those conservation groups.
“I grew up in Issaquah, so I don’t like looking at clear-cuts. And I don’t have any kids, so preserving the land is like my legacy,” said Mitchell, 34.
“Would you rather have a guy like me developing apartments or warehouses? Or a guy like me preserving green space?”
But critics say the way Mitchell works subverts the environmental goals he professes. While working to resell properties to preservation interests, Mitchell almost always proposes some kind of development on his land or sells his interest to a mining or logging company. That strategy, critics say, puts pressure on public agencies and pushes up the price of preservation.
“He found this little niche for himself. I don’t know anybody else who so aggressively searches out properties that are highly desirable from a public-interest standpoint,” says Peter Scholes, state director for the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which buys environmentally sensitive land and holds it until a government purchase can be arranged.
Right now, feelings are running high about the 320-acre Granite Lakes property near North Bend that Mitchell and partners own. It includes a lovely box canyon and the shorelines of two trout-filled lakes.
Mitchell talks about developing campsites and an education center there. What he has done so far, however, is apply for a mining permit.
Before Mitchell and his partners bought the Granite Lakes property last year for $250,000, environmental groups had eyed it and other private holdings nearby as an undeveloped buffer protecting the Alpine Lakes Wilderness.
A creek flows through the land to the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, where the county has spent nearly $1 million protecting some of King County’s most bountiful trout runs. The Middle Fork Outdoor Recreation Coalition (Mid-FORC) envisions the lakes as a destination for bikers, hikers and fishermen.
What attracted Mitchell is the land’s location in the path of the Mountains to Sound Greenway, a proposed trail that would follow the foothills along Interstate 90 from Snoqualmie Pass to Seattle.
Mitchell says he purchased an option on the property at the request of the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which asked that he hold the property until a public purchase could be arranged.
But Doug McClelland, DNR district manager, denies that.
“This has been on our list for a long time,” said Mark Boyar, former Mid-FORC president and a member of the Greenway organizing committee. “Getting this land would have been far easier without him. If anything, he’s increased the cost.”
Granite Lakes was included on last year’s King County “field and stream” bond proposal, with a purchase price estimated at $425,000, pending appraisal. But voters rejected the measure last fall.
Investing in wilderness is a risky venture, as Mitchell’s track record indicates.
Purchasing the land is often the easy part. Reselling it to the government or the dozens of conservation trusts around the West is trickier. Investors must convince land managers and the public that not only is their property environmentally important, but that the threat of logging or development is real. The Forest Service bases appraisals of such land largely on the commercial value of its natural resources.
“The whole idea of wilderness is perception,” says Auburn investor Mark Wagner, who specializes in selling land with old mining claims to the Forest Service. “Knowing that somebody is not going to cut down a tree on that land has enormous value nowadays. That’s what creates this market.”
Timber companies, mining firms and developers often buy “inholdings” — privately held parcels within national forests or wilderness areas — to swap for other land owned by the federal government.
Mitchell is one of only a handful of solo players in this business.
Some early deals went sour, but Mitchell struck gold in 1994 at Spider Meadows. The 320 acres of privately owned land is 25 miles north of Lake Wenatchee, in a basin where the abandoned Trinity copper mine is a monument to the speculative dreams of another era. The asking price was $325,000, and Mitchell purchased the option to buy it at that price for $50,000.
Mitchell quickly offered to resell it to the Forest Service, but the agency didn’t have the money. So Mitchell sold it three months later for $575,000 — reaping a $250,000 profit — to Erickson Logging of Graham, Pierce County.
Mitchell says his real aim was to create pressure for public ownership. “Erickson was my diversion, a scare tactic,” he says. “I told him, `How would you like to double your profits without turning on a chain saw?’ “
Erickson didn’t return telephone calls for this article.
Bluff or not, the deal captured the Forest Service’s attention.
Amid the property’s steep slopes and alpine meadows are stands of harvestable old-growth forest. Conservationists protested the sale. Forest Service officials, worried that Erickson Logging had paid so much for the property that it would have to recoup its cost by logging quickly, sought help from the Trust for Public Land (TPL).
Scholes, director of TPL’s Washington projects, says his organization launched an outside funding appeal and bought the property for $700,000 in 1995. TPL then resold it to the Forest Service for $730,000, enough to cover its costs.
Orville Vanderlin, land manager for the Wenatchee National Forest at the time, says, “If Mitchell paid the right price, then Erickson certainly paid the wrong price. So by the time taxpayers bought it, the price had escalated tremendously. I guess we missed the boat.
“Mike operates under the name of Wildlife Land and Holding, the inference that he’s purchasing these lands to hold and preserve them. That wasn’t our experience.”
Mitchell hopes he can repeat his success with Quartz Mountain, an isolated, privately owned 160-acre parcel within the boundaries of Mount Spokane State Park in Eastern Washington.
