A towering task

A towering task

July 5, 2001

RYAN GRAY of Cortez shows off the wildlife-observation tower he built at Fred and Nancy Thomas’ wildlife preserve east of Cortez. The tower was his Eagle Scout badge project.

By Gail Binkly
Journal Managing Editor

When Ryan Gray approached Fred Thomas about a possible project for his Eagle Scout badge, Thomas, who owns a wildlife preserve near Totten Lake, offered him several choices, including working on erosion control and improving bird habitat.

But Gray rejected those suggestions. He was looking for something more ambitious.

Finally Thomas mentioned that he’d always wanted a wildlife-observation tower on his 47 acres of wetlands. Gray picked that option.

"Fred gave him the opportunity to do a lot of easy things, and the hardest thing is the one he chose," said Vergil Gray, Ryan’s father.

The result, after five weeks of work, was an impressive redwood tower overlooking a pond and a stream on Thomas’ property east of Cortez. The deck is eight feet off the ground, with a railing surrounding it.

"This is one heck of a structure," Thomas said. "I didn’t think it would be this fancy — this good."

Ryan comes by his skills naturally. His father is a project superintendent with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Weeminuche Construction Authority and is now working on the new county jail near Mildred and Empire in Cortez. Ryan said he has about 10 years of construction experience with his family.

He had a little help with the project from his father and brother Eric, he said.

"Dad oversaw it, to make sure we were doing everything properly," Ryan said. And Eric, a Montezuma-Cortez High School graduate who is attending Colorado State University in Fort Collins, came down on summer vacation and figured out a way to put the railing in place without scaffolding.

But Ryan did the bulk of the work himself. "I spent 98 hours on it," he said.

Before getting started, he checked out books from the library and asked Thomas what sort of tower he’d envisioned. Then he designed the deck, railing and staircase. The total cost of the project was about $2,600, Ryan said, with Choice Lumber in Cortez providing the wood at a discount.

"They gave us better than contractor price because they wanted to help out the community," Vergil said.

The project presented a few challenges, Vergil said — "not having power, being off the ground eight feet, and being a quarter-mile from the road, so if you forgot anything, you had to run and get it."

Both Ryan and Eric are outdoors-oriented and have been heavily involved with Boy Scouts. Eric received his Eagle Scout badge for designing the bird habitat in the duck pond in Cortez’s Centennial Park, planting native grasses and berry-producing trees.

Ryan, a member of Troop 522 under Scoutmaster Arnold Haak, has been a Boy Scout for seven years, since he was 11, and was a Cub Scout before that. Now he plans to be a Scout leader, at least until he heads for the University of Colorado in Greeley to study engineering.

But long after he’s gone, the tower will stand at Thomas’ refuge, allowing the many schoolchildren and other visitors the preserve attracts to view eagles, ducks and geese, other birds and deer.

"This is great," Thomas said. "We’re having more people come down here all the time. Now they can watch the birds and wildlife without frightening them."