Editor’s note: This is the first story in a series about Taralyn Romero’s property rights battle in Kittredge, Colorado. Read part 2 on Sunday.
KITTREDGE, Colo.– The house next to Bear Creek looked like something out of a fairy tale, growing right out of the earth alongside towering pine trees. Snow covered the ground, pristine except for a few animal tracks. The stream, nearly frozen over, meandered through the piles of white.
“It was pure bliss,” Taralyn Romero recalled. A playground even sat on the other side of the creek that she pictured her partner’s daughter enjoying.
But as the weather started to warm, pure bliss turned into a nightmare. And Romero, pitted against her neighbors and the local government, would soon become the wicked witch of her fairy tale.
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Taralyn Romero looks over Bear Creek toward Kittredge Park. Her house sat on the south side of the creek, with a small slice of property extending to the north bank of the water. (Courtesy of Taralyn Romero)
Romero is a native Coloradan and had been living in Denver when COVID hit. Like so many city dwellers at that time, she decided she wanted more space and rented a house in the mountains. When the lease was up, she wanted to stay rural.
Enter the house in Kittredge, an unincorporated community about 30 minutes outside of Denver with a population just over 1,300 people as of the 2020 Census.
She fell in love with the home on a small slice of property along Bear Creek and moved in along with her partner and his daughter in March 2021. At first, the only trespassers on her land were elk and other animals.
As the snow melted away, fishermen started wading into the portion of Bear Creek that looped through the edge of her property.
Then summer hit. A couple fishermen turned into dozens of people gathering in Kittredge Park as school let out. Families brought their coolers and floaties and spent the day playing in her creek.
They left behind solitary socks and dirty kids’ clothing strewn over logs and tree stumps, empty baby wipes containers, children’s water bottles and a red Hydro Flask adorned with a sticker of a turtle and the words “F— plastic.”
At first, Romero was perplexed. There was no fence or other boundary between the park and her property. Maybe people just didn’t know they were on private land.
So that first summer, Romero says she asked visitors what they were doing there. Some knew the creek — and land next to it — were private, but told her the previous owners had long granted public access to both. Others were driving more than an hour from surrounding areas to get to a park that had a creek next to it, she said, unaware that the water was on private property.
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Romero said dozens of people descended on the portion of Bear Creek that ran through the edge of her property, eager to enjoy the water during the summer. Some told her they knew it was private land, but that the previous owners let the community use it. Others had no idea, she said. (Courtesy Taralyn Romero)
Romero’s immediate concern was potential liability, she said.
“Having a playground where kids are running back and forth and the parents are sometimes distracted on their phones, made me incredibly concerned that I was going to be dealing with a drowning at worst, or someone getting hurt and slipping on the rocks at best,” she told Fox News Digital.
And while most visitors were respectful, she was upset at the mess left behind each day when the crowds finally went home.
Kids and pets dug holes in the creek bank. People broke trees and left trash. Diapers, cigarettes and cans littered the ground.
Romero said she didn’t know what to do. She put up a “no digging” sign, and she set out a table and chairs with a placard reading, “Private Property: Residents and Invited Guests Only.” They went ignored.
Her family was new to a small town and didn’t want to make waves, she said.
“We wanted to make friends. We wanted to fit in,” she said. But even gentle reminders to people that they were on private property and requests to respect the land were met with aggression and “vitriol,” she said.
Uncertainty over property lines
The summer after Romero purchased the home, county officials told community members that they were researching where the property lines stood. The county believed the creek had likely moved since the plat map for Kittredge was created in 1920.
“We don’t know if the creek has meandered onto their property,” Matt Robbins, spokesman for Jeffco Open Space, told local media at the time.
At a September meeting with the Kittredge Civic Association board, Romero and her partner Michael Eymer clarified that the “Residents and Invited Guests Only” sign meant Kittredge residents. An attorney from a nearby community whose children played in Bear Creek said she was considering seeking a temporary restraining order so families could continue using the park until the county determined who the real owners were.
Meanwhile, hostilities continued to grow.
“I got maps thrown in my face. I got cussed out. I got screamed at,” Romero said. “I got threatened, and I got told that it wasn’t my land and that I had stolen it.”
Romero said “bad actors” and “bullies” quickly outnumbered the rest, coming into her backyard specifically to antagonize the family.
“They were not there to play with the kids. They were there solely to scream at us, to cuss at us and to harass us,” she said.
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Taralyn Romero said she was frustrated at the destruction and mess left behind by some families who visited Bear Creek. (Courtesy Taralyn Romero)
‘People lost their damn minds’
After what Romero described as a “trial period” in which she tried to share the land with the community like the former homeowners had done, she was done playing nice.
She strung a rope across her property and put up no trespassing signs.
“When that rope went up, people lost their damn minds,” she said. “It catapulted this situation into a whole other stratosphere.”
She said people started conspiring online and collectively agreed to ignore the rope and “openly trespass.”
Romero felt like she was portrayed “as a villain… someone who didn’t want to watch children have fun.”
“Once it got on to Facebook, it really took off,” she said, escalating from a couple of hundred people to a “full on frenzy” of mob mentality. People from around the country now hated her.
“It really changed the course of my journey… and threw me into an enormous battle, not only with my community, but eventually with my government as well,” she added.
This is the first story in a series about Taralyn Romero’s property rights battle in Kittredge, Colorado. Read part 2 on Sunday.
Hannah Ray Lambert is an associate producer/writer with Fox News Digital Originals.
