VALLECITO – Less than three days after construction began, a 26-foot-tall geodesic dome greenhouse appeared on a fall afternoon as part of a community-driven initiative.
The dome is part of a broader effort to address food insecurity in the Pine River Valley. Run by Pine River Shares, a community-led nonprofit focused on enacting social change in the valley, the new year-round grow dome will be maintained by volunteers and the produce will be delivered free to Vallecito residents.
“It’s going to help a lot of people up here,” said Chuck Freeman, a project volunteer.
The greenhouse reportedly escaped damage during recent flooding in the Vallecito area, which forced the evacuations of 390 homes. What comes next for the project – as the community regroups – remains up in air, Freeman said.
On the build site’s final day, a mix of contractors and local volunteers happily buzzed about the site with the purposeful energy of an ant colony – working toward a goal that wasn’t immediately clear to outside observers.
The upbeat mood reflected more than the end of a long workday – the project has been more than two years in the making.
Freeman estimated that once the greenhouse begins producing, it will easily support 20 to 30 people.
“I’m imagining all these neighbors – and everybody that has helped – being able to eat and get fresh vegetables out of this instead of traveling 30 minutes, 40 minutes to the store,” he said.
Food insecurity has become a pressing issue in La Plata County, where about 20% of residents eat only two meals a day, Freeman said.
Many of those affected live in the Pine River Valley, where incomes are lower than in more urban areas and rising grocery prices push locally produced food out of the community. Instead, some of the food is exported to wealthier areas like Telluride, Freeman said.
The greenhouse is one key step toward addressing the issue.
Three years ago, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pine River Shares received $390,000 in American Rescue Plan Act money through La Plata County for its Field-to-Fork program.
“That’s kind of when this all started,” said Andrew Trujillo, a Bayfield-based farmer, veteran and volunteer. “We started visiting the communities and seeing what they wanted. And two years ago, we landed on the dome and started to try to find a space for it.”
The dome now sits on a patch of land with year-round sun exposure on Terry Shear’s property in a Vallecito neighborhood.
Shear offered his land for the project because, as he put it, “I like people. I like teaching folks, and I had the space – so why not?”
He was jovial as the project neared its end – reaching the finishing line required numerous community conversations and navigating bureaucratic red tape.
Pine River Shares operates through collective, community-driven advocacy, with no single person designated as project leader. This meant the Vallecito volunteers engaged in many discussions – some more fruitful than others, Shear said.
“I’ll tell you, some of our meetings people were disagreeing, butting heads,” he said. “Once everybody got out here, though, it was different. There’s so much ownership. We’ve been trying to do this for years, and now that it’s finally clear, people haven’t had time to disagree with each other.”
Construction was a feat of collective effort. Normally, said contractor Austin Willis, building a geodesic dome takes him and one employee about 32 hours. With 10 Pine River Shares volunteers working alongside him, the Vallecito project wrapped up in just 19 hours.
“We’ve had a really amazing team of volunteers,” Willis said. “This has been more hands-on deck than we could really use at times. They just flew right through it.”
For Pine River Shares, the dome is part of a broader vision: creating a sustainable food shed in the Pine River Valley – from Vallecito southward – to ensure healthy food remains in the community.
Now the greenhouse is built, but the plan for the working greenhouse remains unresolved.
“We never thought that we were going to get this thing done,” Freeman said. “Now that we’re here, we can start sitting down and deciding, ‘OK, what exactly do we want to do?’”
It remains unclear which crops will be grown, but tomatoes and cucumbers are strong contenders for the year-round garden.
Also under discussion are raised planter beds, to reduce the need for bending – many volunteers are retired – and the construction of an outdoor garden plot for summer growing.
“But who knows how this is going to evolve,” Freeman said. “We have lots of flexibility.”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
