TURRET — Ninety-two-year-old Edwin Bartheld crawled beneath the ghost-town home he built with his own hands — an off-the-grid, log-cabin gem he had hoped one day to leave to his wife. But almost two years after she died, and six years after agreeing to sell the property for a fraction of its worth in a complicated deal, Bartheld was overwhelmed with the upkeep and unhappy with the sale.
He never had much use for the company of others, and he was alone on that day in early September.
He had been busy with one final project. Like the greenhouses, the wood-beamed ceilings and tile floors he had carefully built and laid himself, this project had taken time and planning.
Bartheld sat wedged in a crawl space off the garage, surrounded by a nest of explosives attached to a homemade detonator. He gripped a .22-caliber pistol.
If he couldn’t have his dream house, no one would.
Free spirits
Edwin and Jean Bartheld were free spirits with big dreams when they moved in the early 1970s to remote Turret, a dot of a town that miners hacked out of the San Isabel National Forest in the 19th century.
The couple loved to hike and climb, and they settled on 55 acres of property made up of Gold Bug and other abandoned mining claims that dead-ended in a bowl formed by steep cliffs and rolling hills. The land looks out on the Collegiate Peaks, a soaring row of mountains in the Sawatch Range.
“At first it was just a big old mine shaft and a building next to it,” said Bernice Strawn, a Salida resident and good friend of Jean’s. The couple lived in the building while they built a home that they terraced onto a sloping piece of the land.
“They dragged all the trees down to build the house and stripped all the bark off them by themselves,” said Edward de Brito, Edwin’s nephew.
They dug wells, with Bartheld down below digging and Jean pulling buckets of dirt to the surface.
They were the only residents of the crumbling ghost town, and Bartheld, who had an inventive streak, made some of the equipment and tools he needed to clear and build the property.
Capacitors and other electrical equipment he used on his various projects were piled into boxes in the home, said Robert Gomez, a Salida real estate agent.
He built his own solar system and installed four large tanks, each holding at least 250 gallons of water, and situated them in an attic, Gomez said.
Pumps pushed well water into the home.
“It was a well-built house to be able to hold those tanks,” Gomez said.
By 1978, when the home was completed, they were off the grid in a three-story house powered by the sun and fed by wells. They raised goats and grew much of their own food in greenhouses that they built. Huge picture windows framed the aspens and mountains beyond.
Signs of his inventiveness were scattered throughout the house, Gomez said.
“He was a pioneer of his time for sure. Everything he did there was innovative.”
Bartheld was reclusive, but his wife wasn’t. A devout Catholic, Jean would ski the 12 miles or so from their home to St. Joseph Catholic Church in Salida when the snow was high to attend Mass.
She was a lay minister at the church and would be sitting “in the second pew right behind the organ” every Sunday, said Mary McGlasson, office manager for the church. Though a member of the church, Edwin wasn’t religious.
Isolation dreams
Bartheld began life in Queens, N.Y., one of four children raised by a working mother after their father died, his nephew said.
He graduated with a degree in geology from Syracuse University in New York, and went to work with the oil industry in Alaska. At some point in his career, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and for a time manned fire lookout towers in wilderness areas, de Brito said.
The isolation suited Bartheld, a loner, who “avoided people whenever possible,” he said.
If the rough draft of a letter penciled onto the inside cover of a geological field guide that he gave to de Brito is an indication, Bartheld knew what he wanted and where he wanted to go in life even as a young man.
In the letter, apparently to a girlfriend at the time, he said he wanted to live on the Western Slope of the Rockies.
“The inference was that it wasn’t her dream so they were breaking up,” de Brito said.
In 1958, Bartheld helped Peter Balfells, a brother-in-law who later formed Bal-Seal Engineering, develop a ring used to seal equipment at low temperatures, and originally used in the aerospace industry, Balfells said. The two later formed a short-lived company.
Bartheld lived with Balfells and his wife, Bartheld’s sister, for about a year, and when he moved, Balfells dissolved the company.
He was “very creative, very smart, but difficult to work with. He wanted to be alone. He hated the government,” Balfells said.
Years later, in Colorado, he met Jean, a Wisconsin transplant and physical education teacher in Denver, who shared his passion for the outdoors, said Strawn, her friend.
Seller’s remorse
Living off the grid had its appeal, but it also brought hardships. Access to medical care was difficult. Upkeep was a chore, and chopping firewood didn’t get any easier as Bartheld approached his ninth decade.
The couple didn’t have a landline phone. For a while, Bartheld had a cellphone, Gomez said. But the signal couldn’t reach to and from the home, and he had to know when a call was coming in order to trudge someplace where he could receive it.
Because there was no phone, Jean and Strawn would make plans following Mass on Sundays for hikes they would take later in the week.
Bartheld thought his wife would outlive him, and he worried about being able to provide for her after he was gone.
“He was concerned about what Jean would do, because it was quite a project to run all that solar system and everything,” Strawn said.
In 2007, the couple, who had no children, listed the property for sale with Gomez, asking $1.2 million.
The price was too high, especially in a down real estate market, Gomez said. Complicating any sale was the fact that much of it was on unpatented mining claims — land for which Bartheld held a 100-year lease with the Bureau of Land Management, Gomez said.
In spite of that, Bartheld thought he owned the property and had fenced it in.
“I said, you shouldn’t have these fences up, because this is an area you are leasing,” Gomez said.
Bartheld did own the land on which the house and other buildings were located, and Gomez estimated that a fair price in today’s market would be between $325,000 and $480,000. Chaffee County valued the property at $488,000, according to records.
Bartheld then met Balder Saunders, a Florida resident who was visiting Salida with his wife, Jennifer, and fell in love with the area, said Kurt Beddingfield, who knew the Barthelds and Saunders and wrote an account about Bartheld for the Salida Citizen website.
What happened next remains hazy, and Saunders, a mandolin player who lives in Florida, didn’t return a call from The Denver Post.
He wanted to buy the property, and the Barthelds didn’t want to leave their home, said Beddingfield, who heard the story from Saunders.
Saunders said the Barthelds’ lovingly built house and property didn’t meet lending standards, and he couldn’t get financing for the deal. Bartheld proposed an idea that would erase the need for a lender.
In return for a life lease, which allowed them to stay on the property “until death or an agreed-upon time,” they would sell for $50,000.
Saunders would create a music camp for children and a music studio on the land.
The couple loved the idea, said Beddingfield, who did some work on the home for the Barthelds.
Bartheld, who painted watercolors, was an artist himself, and Jean “didn’t want someone to buy it and have a rich man who had a summer home there. She wanted to share it,” Beddingfield said.
They agreed to a sale price of $50,000. Saunders would pay the property taxes.
James Treat, of Chaffee Title & Escrow in Salida, said his company did the closing on the deal. The title company cut the check on Sept. 17, 2008.
Treat thought $50,000 was too low a price.
The solar panels and other equipment around the compound alone were likely worth more than that, Gomez said.
“At the closing, I said, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, these are good people,’ ” Treat said. “They wanted to do something that was philanthropic.”
Some time later, Bartheld told Treat he thought Saunders treated him shabbily.
Bartheld believed that in buying the property, Saunders accepted some responsibility for upkeep and had insured the house. When a chimney fire damaged his roof, he found out he was wrong, Beddingfield said.
Saunders told Beddingfield that the house was uninsurable.
Bartheld went ahead and had the roof fixed, but he was angry, Beddingfield said.
Two years ago, a pump in his well failed, forcing him to drive 4 miles to a neighbor’s home where he loaded water into a small white Toyota pickup he owned and brought it back to the house.
He continued making the trip until he died, said Peggy Sherman, who lives about 700 yards from Bartheld’s home.
She and her husband always knew when the vehicle passing their home belonged to Bartheld.
“He never left second gear,” she said.
The final project
On Christmas Eve 2012, Jean went to Mass in Salida, Strawn said.
On her way home she became sick and stopped on the side of a road. When she was late returning, Bartheld went to look for her.
He brought her home, where she died. “They couldn’t revive her,” Strawn said.
Bartheld went on, but there was a hole in his life.
“They had been together so long and done so many things together,” Strawn said.
No one is sure when, but Bartheld began planning his end.
In the month before he died, he started selling household and other items, Peggy Sherman said.
He may have been sick. Brad Sherman, who typically went to work at a time that Bartheld sometimes went to town, noticed that he was heading to a hospital several times.
He had long been close to deaf, and his inability to hear was a contributing factor to his isolation, Strawn said. Jean had helped him understand conversations that went on around him when they were in public.
Investigators believe Bartheld feared his property would be developed against his desire.
In the years after they built their home, he and Jean had watched as their isolated garden spot became a magnet for people seeking a place to build a mountain retreat.
The warranty deed specified “no selling of or development to property for seven years from the contract dated July 29, 2008.” The seventh year from that date was looming.
“He wasn’t too happy with that whole Turret thing. About 12 years ago, they replatted it and started selling the land off,” said Steve Duhaime, a former neighbor of Bartheld’s.
One day in early September, Bartheld crawled into a corner in which he had placed sacks of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer used in the Oklahoma City bombing. He had placed other explosives around the house, according to the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office.
Bartheld carried three guns. He chose a .22-caliber pistol, pressed it to his throat and pulled the trigger.
Investigators later said there had been a small explosion in the space, but they weren’t sure if he had triggered it before shooting himself.
A neighbor found Bartheld’s body on Sept. 12. He had been dead several days.
“He was bitter about the sale of the property. It was a legitimate sale, there was no swindling or corruption, but I think it was seller’s remorse,” said Chaffee County sheriff’s Cmdr. Derek Bos.
Bartheld may have been angry, but he wasn’t some crazy hermit who wanted his death to make headlines, Strawn said.
“He was always a very gentle, thoughtful kind of person,” she said.
Suicide may seem an odd way for someone who was as cool and rational as Bartheld was, “but in many ways that is a rational way to go if you no longer can do for yourself.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dpmcghee
