There are only two ways to reach the 200-acre Colorado property known as Tall Timber: by train or helicopter. But back when octogenarian matriarch Judy Beggrow was just a girl, there was a third way—by horse.
Tucked inside the 1.8-million-acre San Juan National Forest near Durango—and surrounded by protected public land with no public road access—the estate is now on the market for $25 million.
Judy, her son, Johnroy, and his wife, Dionne, have listed it with Max Cawal.
Its centerpiece is the three-story timber lodge Judy and her late husband, Denny, built by hand.
It went up in a single summer and opened as a resort in 1972. Expanded in the mid-1990s, the lodge has 21 bedrooms, 22 full bathrooms, and 10 half-baths, laid out more like a boutique mountain hotel than a family home.
A three-story great room anchored by a river-rock fireplace opens onto decks with views of forest, river, and surrounding peaks. The dining and gathering spaces are served by a commercial-grade kitchen built for feeding a crowd.
Cabins and staff quarters add 18 bedrooms, 15 full baths, and two half-baths, bringing the property total to 39 bedrooms, 40 full baths, and 13 half baths.
Then there are the details you won’t find on most estates. The property has an old-fashioned soda shop and ice cream parlor, a vintage-style barbershop, a resort-style pool and hot tub, and a three-story greenhouse where the family grows 35,000 flowers.
It has extensive frontage on the Animas River, and one of the longest zip-line courses in the country runs through its trees.
The sale also includes use of a nearby 10,000-square-foot private hangar with a one-bedroom apartment. By helicopter, local ski hub Purgatory Resort is about five minutes away and Telluride about 20 minutes away.
But the real story of this property is set deep in the canyon itself. Over the past century, it has been a mining-era outpost, a family dude ranch and hunting destination, a five-star resort that shared top honors with the Ritz-Carlton, and a family-run zip line.
Judy has been here for all of it.
“My father had a reputation in the canyon,” says Judy, who spent a day in July walking me through the land her family has worked for 80 years.
Her father, Ross McCausland, was an electrical engineer who helped develop the automatic transmission during World War II and met his wife, Ethel, on a train from Chicago to Denver.
In 1946, the couple opened Ah! Wilderness Guest Ranch, an 80-acre dude ranch a mile south of what is now Tall Timber. Ross later described it as “a place where children and adults could play together.”
The family ate venison, kept a garden and dairy cows, and raised pigs. In the lean early years, they boarded the train with sandwiches and homemade cream puffs to sell—a venture that yielded what was sometimes their only income. Ross led hunting trips that included a train ride into the canyon, a week of hunting, a personal chef, and lodging, all for $175.
Back then, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, which today is a tourist line carrying some 200,000 riders a year, only ran about once a week, mostly hauling freight out of Silverton.
“The train really didn’t like passengers back then,” Judy says. So her father built his own custom motorcars to run on the tracks, seven in all.
As a girl, Judy chased the train on horseback. She also watched scenes from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” being filmed on the line in the late 1960s.
The ranch was built with help from a neighbor, Oscar Schaaf, who ran a one-man sawmill. His older sister was Olga Little, Colorado’s first female jack packer, who once roped 18 snow-stranded miners together and led them on a 16-hour trek to safety. A nearby mountain bears her name.
When Judy and Denny bought the property in the late 1960s, the land had no power, so the young couple dug the holes and set the poles to bring electricity from the nearby Tacoma hydroelectric plant. Next came water. Judy remembered playing as a child in a freshwater stream that ran down from the mountain, so she and Denny hiked up the peak behind today’s lodge and laid pipe to bring spring water down to the homesite.
Tall Timber opened to guests in 1972 and went on to earn five-star and five-diamond ratings from the Mobil Travel Guide and AAA. Judy did all the cooking, sharpening her skills in food and wine classes at Epcot, where they kept a second home for the off season. With 10 guest cabins, the resort hosted up to 30 guests at a time, served by a peak staff of about 40.
The resort was no stranger to celebrities. Christie Brinkley once stayed 10 days—something she wrote about in a tell-all piece in People magazine in April 2025. On Tuesdays, a helicopter carried guests to picnics above 11,000 feet at the nearby alpine lakes known as the Jewel Lakes, where chefs waited in tall white hats.
Humans weren’t the only guests, either. Welcome baskets warned visitors to close their windows at night, and one evening a mother bear turned up on a guest’s couch, eating an apple. She later taught her cubs to pop off window screens and raid the rooms for fruit.
The family also became the first private party in Colorado to successfully rewild a juvenile deer, found abandoned beside its dead mother. During hunting season Philippe wore a red scarf so no one would mistake him for game, and tennis balls on his antlers kept him gentle with the dogs.
In the mid-2000s, the family added a zip line through the trees. When visitors showed more interest in “playing in the trees” than in staying overnight, it became the property’s main business, and the last resort guests left in 2008. This past summer, at the height of its final season, the zip line drew 60 to 80 riders a day.
Now, the family is ready to move on.
Judy is preparing to move to Florida. And with Johnroy and Dionne’s only daughter in college, the couple wants to spend summers traveling rather than running the business. They’d love to see a buyer revive Denny’s vision of a boutique five-star destination, but they’re realistic.
“If Kevin Costner buys it, pick a celebrity,” Johnroy says. “In the end, it will be the same thing: someone enjoying it with their families.”
Dionne goes briefly quiet when asked for her favorite memory of living here.
“Waking up one Christmas morning to a proposal,” she says, glancing over at Johnroy.
It’s hard to picture this place in winter, with the canyon so green in summer and Judy’s flower arrangements filling baskets on the porch. But like everything here, winter is steeped in stories: snowmobiling, Christmas trees as tall as the great room can hold, a canyon blanketed in white beyond the windows while a fire roars in the three-story chimney.
Whoever buys the place will inherit the seclusion of a wild Colorado canyon and a property built to host a crowd.
Much of the hard work is already done, from the power lines and spring water the Beggrows brought in by hand to the commercial kitchen and staff quarters that once kept a five-star resort running year-round.
The property could serve as a private family compound, an executive retreat or, subject to approvals, a return to hospitality.
During the summer, the river, pool, and zip line take center stage. In winter, the slopes at Purgatory await. The buyer will also inherit the stretch of track that is the only way in other than by air. For years, the Beggrows rode the train or ran their own homemade cars on the rails.
When asked what getting in and out was like in those early years, Judy answers without a hint of fear.
“We derailed a few times,” she says.
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