The power of privacy

PIKE NATIONAL FOREST -- Welcome to Ruxton Park.

Population: 1.

Guides on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway point it out several times a day, as the trains pass by Ron Storer's home and workplace. Most days, the train riders are the only people Storer sees. Some days, more bears stop by than people.

It's a hermit-like existence that's just fine with the 57-year-old Storer, who is wrapping up his first season living alone in this remote wooded valley on the south slope of Pikes Peak.

"I like the solitude myself. I've really been in a lot of remote places around the world and I just enjoy that sort of thing," said Storer, during a recent tour of his mountain refuge. "I don't miss anything about town."

In a world of automation, this place is an enigma. Since 1930, a Colorado Springs Utilities employee has lived here six months of the year, running the Ruxton Hydroelectric Plant.

The 1-megawatt plant provides enough energy for 800 homes at any given time and slows Ruxton Creek as it flows off the mountain and into Manitou Springs.

Storer came here in May, the ninth caretaker in 78 years. He will probably be the last.

To save money, Utilities will install equipment next summer to fully automate the small plant, like the utility's other two hydroelectric plants, in Manitou Springs and at the Air Force Academy. The house, which is nearly as old as the plant, will remain, to occasionally house workers. A caretaker of nearby reservoirs will continue to live in another house here some of the time.

But most of the time, the population of Ruxton Park will be zero.

Said Storer, "Now we're putting in new technology to automate it again, which will put me out of a job."

The plant was built in 1925 for $16,866, the materials hauled up by train, the stones set by hand. It was designed to be automated, with valves controllable from the plant in Manitou, and the two plants together provided 85 percent of Colorado Springs' electricity.

Something about the automation apparently didn't work, because the caretaker's house was built in 1930.

With the exception of a few drought years, when not enough water has flowed from Lake Moraine to power the plant, there have been caretakers since. They aren't always easy to hire.

"It really does take a special personality to work here," said Brent Richardson, Utilities' manager of remote plants and the summer caretaker in 1992. He recruits replacements while the caretaker is on vacation.

"They make it for about a week, then they start to miss being able to go to the store, go to the movies," Richardson said.

The caretaker is not quite as isolated as in "The Shining." The plant is at 9,051 feet and is only a few miles from Manitou Springs. Getting to Colorado Springs involves a 72-mile drive each way, much of it on rough dirt roads, or a much shorter hike or ride down the Manitou and Pikes Peak Rail Co. Utilities operated a "putt," a small rail vehicle, until a fatal crash in the 1960s.

Caretaker Denis Rasmussen, 70, and his wife spent summers there from 1993 to 2007, though illness prevented him from being there this year.

"One year I set a record for myself, five months without going to town," said Rasmussen, from his home in Springfield, Ore.

"The serenity of the area just made it so neat," he said. "We enjoyed good weather, when everybody else was sweltering in heat. We just couldn't ask for anything nicer."

Storer retired from his job as a control room operator of utilities' Ray D. Nixon Power Plant and came to Ruxton Park a week later as caretaker. He has no family in the area, and has worked in remote outposts in Alaska and on an early-warning defense system in Greenland, he said, and is no stranger to solitude.

His day starts at 7 a.m., taking weather measurements for the National Weather Service. Then he checks the plant, which runs around-the-clock, and makes any adjustments to the water flow needed downstream. He then takes a 5-minute walk in the woods.

That's about as far as he can get from the plant. Despite living in such a beautiful place, it's essentially a 24-hour-a-day job, because he has to be nearby in case the plant needs to be shut down, the flow needs to be adjusted or there is a problem.

The rest of the day is spent checking monitors, making any adjustments and doing maintenance.

Every two weeks, he gets a day off for a "m and m" run - milk and mail and to stock up on frozen food. Another Utilities employee does his job then.

The number on his house, "226," is a joke, put there by a former resident. His home has no address, just a GPS coordinate.

Except for the isolation, living here is rather normal. There is satellite television, phones, heat, plumbing and Internet access - though it is dial-up, one of the few drawbacks Storer mentioned.

This year, he will stay until Dec. 1, a month later than caretakers usually remain, to work on the house and prepare it for being unoccupied.

Then the plant will shut down and he will return to Colorado Springs to figure out what to do in retirement, until spring, when he hopes to go back up to Ruxton, if he is needed.

Utilities officials acknowledge a nostalgia for the plant - they've kept the original dials and gauges for aesthetic purposes, though the plant is run by modern equipment and few people outside of Utilities ever see it.

"It's a legacy plant. You don't want to make it look like we've done something to it that shouldn't have been done. It's just one of our passions," Richardson said.

The plant's 1 megawatt is a tiny fraction of Utilities' 863-megawatt system, though it does help the utility meet renewable energy requirements. The job of controlling downstream flows is more important.

The cost to automate it will be $100,000 to $150,000, though Richardson said Utilities will save money by not paying to have a caretaker, which costs $26,000 a year.

But that doesn't make it any easier for the caretaker to leave.

"Look around," Storer said. "I love it up here.

"The scenery is spectacular."

As the train pulled up to take Storer's visitors back down to Manitou, 200 people waved. The caretaker waved back, as much a fixture here as the train, trees or the mountain itself.