MNN - Mother Nature Network

Two and a half years after it was first listed, Val Kilmer's Pecos River Ranch property has finally sold. 

 

The 5,328-acre eco-escape of beautiful rivers, gullies and mountains was initially offered in 2009 for $33 million. Citing global economic conditions, the 51-year-old dropped that price a year later by $10 million and then knocked another several million off in early January.

 

According to reports, that appears to have been the sweet spot for Texas oil executive Benjamin A. Strickling III and his wife, who purchased a majority of the acreage for $18.5 million. Kilmer, it appears, will retain 141 acres, though it's not clear what that encompasses or what he'll do with it. 

 

The actor's original business plan was to develop high-priced homes, constructed with indigenous materials (adobe, wood, and stone for natural insulation and heat), and featuring solar panels and a windmill system. Each house would be required by its “members” to have its own government-certified organic garden; its fruits would go to a co-op.

 

“It says something that almost 100 percent of the people who come here just feel good,” he said in a 2006 interview. ”There’s a right-ness to developing a community that interacts with the local one. I have to develop it because otherwise, it’s really wasting the land.”

 

“I love the gardens of Paris and London," he added. "They’re so cultivated and fancy. But a wild garden like this place has that strange, unexpected bouquet. And that one wildflower growing out of a rock has earned its right to exist. Nature, he says, makes me happier than what man seems to cultivate.”