From mansions to mobile homes: the Black Forest area north of Colorado Springs is home to a diverse mix of properties.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: WHO OWNS COLORADO - Residential real estate develops and gains revenue

Legend says Colorado's Black Forest gained its exotic name when its stands of Ponderosa Pine made an early German immigrant nostalgic for the Old Country.

The area north of Colorado Springs is an anomaly, an oddly manicured-looking forest that produces the illusion that the onlooker has been transported somewhere in the high country, not 20 miles east of the foothills on what ought to be the plains.

This illusion extends to what might be termed the forest's culture, which resembles a microcosm of the larger state, as if Beaver Creek could be jammed next to Commerce City.

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That's because Black Forest long has been a grab-bag of "acreage property," not platted "town property."

"It's extremely diverse," says Vicki French Westapher, a broker associate with Colorado Springs-based Re/Max Properties Inc. "A lot of the parcels are horse property; a lot of the parcels are on well and septic; and a lot of the areas do not have covenants, so you will see a $250,000 house next door to a $700,000 house."

You also will see numerous residents whose least concern is keeping up with the Joneses. To wit:

"I have a client who has that person with the six pickup trucks in his front yard living across the street from her," Westapher says.

"Black Forest is where you can have very, very nice homes next to a trailer or a meth lab or whatever," says Robin Barron, broker associate with Colorado Springs-based Heritage Realty.

"There are a lot of sub-communities out here," says Judy von Ahlefeldt, since 1997 the owner-publisher of the Black Forest News & Palmer Divide Pioneer. "You have commuters, you have kids, you have old people, you have the bikers and the rednecks. We have some wonderful iconoclasts like that, but they are fast disappearing."

Most people think of the Black Forest as including only its famous pines. False.

The Black Forest News' Ahlefeldt wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the landscape ecology of the Continental Divide. She notes that there's nothing else like the Black Forest between Wyoming's Cheyenne Gangplank and New Mexico's Raton Mesa.

"A lot of people draw a line around the trees, which is much smaller than the Black Forest, which goes clear up into Douglas and Elbert counties," she says. "It goes way farther north of the El Paso County line because it's interspersed with alluvion, grassland where you have bedrock sticking up between the trees. So it depends on whether you want to be ecological or political, and of...