Mike Biggio unpins a map from the wall and places it on a table. With a single fi nger, he traces the lines that show the march of the cannabis industry on the outskirts of Mof- fat — a town in Colorado’s San Luis Valley that, until recently, had a population of fewer than 120 people. “So, this is the original town,” he says, cir- cling a clump of lots hugging State Highway 17. Then his fi nger veers west. “This portion, this little triangle here, is Phase One. This is Phase Two and Phase Three. We recently acquired another sixty acres that we annexed into town, and we’re going to be using that for solar.” Biggio is sitting in his office inside a bright-green railroad car, one of several old train cars that have been repurposed as the headquarters for Area 420, the company developing a complex of marijuana farms at Moffat’s back door. The cars are an odd sight, but no odder than the rest of Phase One, a hundred-acre spread of greenhouses, shipping containers, RVs and porta-potties, construction equipment, grain bins being converted into housing, labs, security cam- eras, and fences covered in green mesh, accessed by gravel roads with winky-wink names like Mary Jane Lane, Dunn Deal Drive and Shakedown Street. Surrounded by high desert and fl anked by the Sangre de Cristo range, the place has an otherworldly, improvisational feel to it, as if an alien inva- sion force had set up camp amid the saltgrass and greasewood. The groundwork for Area 420 was laid in 2018, when Biggio and his partner in the proj- ect, developer Whitney Justice, persuaded Moffat’s town board to approve the fi rst in a series of annexations of their company’s property that would add 420 acres to the town’s tax rolls. The annexations enabled Biggio and Justice to get out from under some pesky county regulations and allowed them to tap into the municipal water supply; although the land they had acquired and planned to sell to growers had its own private well, it was inadequate for the level of marijuana cultiva- tion they had in mind. Four years later, Area 420 now has close to eighty licensed grow operations, producing thousands of plants and millions in annual revenue. But the current level of activity is merely a warm-up, as far as Biggio is concerned. He envisions the San Luis Valley becom- ing a mecca of cannabis tourism, similar to California’s wine country, with Area 420 at its center. Visitors could tour a grow, shop at a smorgasbord of dispensaries, sample the wares at a consump- continued on page 8 7 westword.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | WESTWORD AUGUST 11-17, 2022 JAY VOLLMAR
