Journal 80: Parallel Pioneers, Steve Peirotti and Alfred Mayes

At first glance, Pinehaven and Cuchara Camps seem to belong to entirely different worlds. One began as a bustling summer resort, complete with cabins, dining halls, and guests arriving by railcar and wagon. The other took shape quietly in the forest where a cabin community built slowly, one family at a time. Though they share the same valley in Cuchara, Colorado, they reflect different eras, different economic models, and very different rhythms of life. 

But step past the maps and mortgages, and something interesting begins to emerge.

Beneath the surface, beyond legal descriptions and plat lines, there is a familiar pattern. A shared instinct. A way of seeing land not just as property, but as possibility.

That common thread runs straight through the men who imagined these places into being: George Alfred Mayes, who shaped Cuchara Camps in the early twentieth century, and Steve Peirotti, who brought the Pinehaven Cabin Community to life decades later. 

While Pinehaven’s earliest foundations were laid under John Vories during its formative years, it was Steve Peirotti who emerged as the community’s defining visionary. Steve shaped its long-term character, scale, and enduring identity.(1)  

What Peirotti and Mayes shared went far beyond a simple love of mountain land. Here are five things these two visionaries had in common.

1. They Built Without Certainty

Most builders choose to begin where momentum already exists and where infrastructure is in place, financing is secure, and success feels statistically likely. George Mayes and Steve Peirotti did the opposite. Neither waited for ideal conditions, and neither insisted on certainty before acting. If they had waited for perfect conditions, neither community would exist today.

Mayes launched Cuchara Camps at a time when nothing resembling a resort existed in the valley. Operating under a privately financed land arrangement rather than outright ownership, he looked at the old Gould Ranch and saw not pasture, but possibility. Long before legal title was fully settled, cabins began to rise. A dining hall followed. Then a general store and an event pavilion. These were powerful physical commitments to a future that had not yet been guaranteed.

Decades later, Peirotti followed a strikingly similar path. He, too, borrowed to acquire land and moved forward while carrying real financial risk. Pinehaven had electricity in its early years, but little else to support a growing cabin community. There was no established water source, no central sanitation system, and no road network designed for expansion. Still, he built.

In an era before feasibility studies, sustainability thresholds, and formal development preconditions, these men trusted something less quantifiable. They understood momentum matters, that vision creates opportunity, and that waiting for certainty can become a quiet form of procrastination.

They built first and allowed the future to catch up.

2. They Saw Opportunity Where Others Saw Obstacles

When George Mayes and Steve Peirotti first looked out over what was still largely forested wilderness, they didn’t see limitation. They saw opportunity and adventure.

The reasons not to build were obvious. The land was remote. The elevation was high. Winters were long. Cities were far away, and infrastructure was scarce. To most observers, these were red flags. To Mayes and Peirotti, they were the point.

Cool mountain nights became a promise rather than a problem. Dense forests offered shelter, not inconvenience. Remoteness translated into refuge, and mountain breezes became the kind of fresh air people traveled long distances to find.

Peirotti looked at an untamed mountainside and imagined cabin lots with sweeping views of the Spanish Peaks. Mayes stood in the Cuchara River Valley and saw something equally compelling. He saw a place where working people could afford rest, recreation, entertainment, and the simple joy of new friendships with neighbors from far beyond the valley.

Both men understood something that later generations would rediscover: what is hardest to reach often becomes what is most cherished once you arrive.

They didn’t try to tame the land. They listened to it and built accordingly.

3. They Built Incrementally, Not Grandly

Both Mayes and Peirotti practiced an old-school principle that has nearly vanished: it is better to grow into something than to be overwhelmed by it. Long before today’s “go big or go home” mindset and its preference for big-bang development, these men were patient builders. Plodders, in the best sense of the word, are the kind who show up every day, long after trendier builders have moved on.

Neither Pinehaven nor Cuchara Camps arrived fully formed. Their endurance is no accident. It reflects an understanding of how the real world actually works and the quiet power of incrementalism. Vision guided them, but patience set the pace, and risk was carefully tempered along the way.

Mayes added cabins, amenities, and services gradually, responding to real use rather than forcing the land to conform to a rigid master plan. Peirotti allowed Pinehaven to grow cabin by cabin, road by road, and family by family as the community evolved organically instead of on a timetable.

This wasn’t a lack of ambition. It was discipline.

While many modern entrepreneurs want everything at once, Mayes and Peirotti understood what has largely been forgotten: incrementalism reduces risk, accommodates uncertainty, encourages learning, and creates its own momentum.

They also understood something future generations in the valley would learn the hard way during later attempts at large-scale recreation development. Mountain places reveal themselves slowly. Build too much, too fast, and you often destroy the very qualities people come seeking in the first place.

4. They Created Places, Not Just Properties

This may have been their most important trait of all.

George Mayes didn’t simply sell cabins, beds, or meals. He created a destination shaped by shared tables, summer group outings, and simple, affordable pleasures that turned strangers into companions and visits into traditions.

When it came time to name his dream, George Mayes chose a title that reflected both place and purpose: Cuchara Camps. Not everyone approved. Blanche Unfug,a longtime visitor who knew the valley’s history well, tried to change his mind. The word camp, she warned, carried the wrong associations. Across southern Colorado, coal camps still evoked images of soot, hardship, and hard labor, not spruce forests and summer light.

Mayes listened, but he didn’t waver.

To him, Cuchara Camps said exactly what he intended. It wasn’t meant to sound exclusive or refined. It was meant to sound like a welcoming place where ordinary people of modest means could gather, rest, and experience the extraordinary beauty of the Rockies. In the name itself was a clue to Mayes’s deeper instinct: this was never about luxury. It was about belonging.(2) 

In a similar way, Steve Peirotti didn’t merely subdivide land. He created a setting families returned to year after year, until time there was measured not in seasons, but in generations. In Pinehaven, Texans formed lifelong friendships with Kansans they never would have met otherwise. 

Children grew up, returned with families of their own, and inherited cabins that came with stories as well as keys. I was reminded of this during one of Pinehaven’s Firewise workdays, when I struck up a conversation with a man working beside me. I asked when he had purchased his cabin.

“I didn’t,” he said. “My grandparents built it. I’ve been coming here ever since. Now my wife and I own it.”

In that moment, Pinehaven’s story was no longer abstract. It was standing right in front of me as proof that what was built here was meant to last. It has changed the way I think about the stewardship of our family’s cabin. 

What Mayes and Peirotti built here carries emotional weight. That weight is more than amenities and square footage. It is what gave their communities longevity and staying power.

5. They Left Flexible Legacies

Perhaps most revealing is what Mayes and Peirotti chose not to do.

Neither man locked his vision into unyielding rules or rigid governance. Instead of freezing their communities in time, they allowed them room to breathe, adapt, evolve, and respond to changing needs.

As cabins spread across the valley, Cuchara Camps shifted with them. What began as seasonal lodging gradually gave way to new uses and new eras. Cabins gave rise to restaurants, gift shops, hotels, and bed-and-breakfast homes as the community matured.

Pinehaven followed a similar arc. Summer retreats slowly became year-round homes, family inheritances, and steady anchors for households now scattered across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado.

Both legacies endured not because they resisted change, but because they embraced it. Their strength lay in flexibility and that flexibility is precisely what made them last.

Why This Matters

The similarities between Pinehaven and Cuchara Camps aren’t accidental. They reflect a particular mountain instinct that values place over speed, people over projections, and stewardship over spectacle. The question now is whether we will steward these places with the same patience that first made them worth coming to.

Mayes and Peirotti belonged to different generations, but they shared a way of seeing opportunity in the high country. They trusted that if a place was cared for well enough, people would keep coming.

They were right.

And that may be why, generations later, Pinehaven and Cuchara Camps still feel connected, not by a road alone, but by a shared philosophy quietly written into the land itself.(3)

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Footnotes

Parenthetical numbers in the text (e.g., 5) correspond to the sequentially numbered citations listed below.

1. Gene and Rhonda Roncone, “Part 5: John Vories and the Beginnings of Pinehaven,” Cabin in the Pines (Cuchara) (blog), June 2025, https://cabininthepinescuchara.blogspot.com/2025/06/part-5-john-vories-and-beginnings-of.html

2.  Hazel E. Cross and Josephine C. Jochem, River of Friendship (Chicago: Adams Press, 1970), 17

3. Author’s note: In preparing this article, the author used AI-assisted tools for research support, proofreading, fact-checking, and stylistic refinement. The narrative, analysis, and historical interpretations are the author’s own, and responsibility for accuracy rests solely with the author. The blog’s research methodology statement is available at: https://cabininthepinescuchara.blogspot.com/2019/03/methodology-sources-and-use-of-research.html