CARBONDALE — NASCAR celebrity Jeff Gordon has sold most of nearly 2,000 acres he owned in the high country above Missouri Heights to a development group headed by the man who created the Dallas National Golf Club in Texas a few years ago.
And John MacDonald, formerly of the Ernst & Young accounting and consulting firm, said he plans to build much the same kind of project here as he did in Dallas. The course designer is to be golf architect Tom Fazio, who also designed the Dallas National course.
The deal has yet to close, said broker Scott Davidson of the Aspen Associates Realty Group.
The due diligence work, including applying for development approvals from Garfield County, is in the early stages, and the deal is not expected to be completed until mid-2009, MacDonald predicted. Neither man would disclose the selling price.
Gordon, who reportedly bought the land outside of Carbondale in 2006 for $9 million, was not even thinking of selling the land until MacDonald approached him. But over time he became convinced it was the thing to do, according to John Bickford, Gordon’s stepfather and business manager.
“I found it by actually driving around and looking for golf property,” MacDonald said of the deal, adding with a hearty laugh, “It took a while, but I wore him down.”
Gordon retains a 50-acre parcel of his own, as well as “a couple of memberships in the club,” MacDonald said.
The pastures and rolling hills of the property are some of the most secluded and scenic terrain that remains undeveloped in the valley. The property has only a humble old ranch house and a tiny log cabin, along with a few barns and sheds. There are no opulent displays that would indicate it’s owned by a popular, multimillionaire race car driver.
Gordon’s parcel overlooks the proposed golf course site but is not near it, MacDonald said, stressing that the 300-acre golf course will not be peppered with homes, as are a number of other golf subdivisions that have sprung up in the Roaring Fork Valley.
The land actually is two ranches — known formerly as the Gould and Gordon ranches — divided by a small parcel of public land that Bickford described as a “driveway” along which the ranchers would once drive herds of cattle.
http://vyous.com/sports//nascar/2009/01/05/nascar-star-selling-missouri-heights-ranch-—aspen-times