Ed Quillen

Recently I had to drive across South Park, a vast valley rimmed by mountains in the middle of Colorado. Something stuck out that I hadn’t noticed on previous excursions: half-a-dozen new towers to provide service to cellular telephone users.

Or at least I think that’s what they were. For all I know, the towers could have been connected to some new top-secret Homeland Security intruder detection system, or maybe they were part of an array of antennas searching for intelligent life in the universe.

Most of South Park is in Park County. A few years ago, the county’s Board of Adjustment denied a request for a cell-phone tower because it would interfere with “key vistas” in an open-space zone.

The company offered to build a fake silo around the 90-foot tower, on the assumption that this would fit well in a rural area. The board countered that a silos might fit in dairy country, but not in grazing country like South Park.

The company then offered to scale back to a 65-foot tower, and make it look like a ranch windmill. The board rejected that, too.

Something must have changed in Park County, since it now teems with cell towers that look like, well, cell towers. They’re not disguised as silos, windmills, mine headframes, water towers, smelter smokestacks or trees.

Why are the towers accepted now, when they were rather controversial a decade ago?

In Colorado, you can explain plenty with the phrase “real estate values.” Those towers might have been a blot on the landscape, and thus hard on scenic rural property prices, a few years ago when cell phones were a novelty.

Now they’re a common appliance. And that prominent tower visible from your scenic ranchette is a message that you can stay connected, even if your electricity is intermittent and you’re on a gravel road that is maintained only in the years when your district’s county commissioner is up for re-election. The tower has become a marketing asset, rather than an eyesore.

Even so, I miss the creative disguises, since I find mine headframes and windmills much more charming than these stark towers. But then, I wasn’t shopping for real estate; I was just driving through.