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Steamboat Springs — Kathleen Titus reluctantly has resigned herself to giving up her Earthship in North Routt, which means Realtor Darrin Fryer has a new listing that stands out among the 3,000-plus offerings on the multiple listing service.

Green homebuyers who are serious about walking the walk will want to tour Titus' 1,640-square-foot home built into a low rise atop Willow Creek Pass. It's roughly halfway between Clark and Steamboat Lake State Park, northwest of Steamboat Springs.

Titus, who is a registered architect in Colorado and oversees in-house building projects for TIC in Steamboat Springs, built the house 13 years ago. It owes much of its energy efficiency to its walls made of about 3,000 automobile tires and countless aluminum cans packed with clay soil from the site and painstakingly coated with adobe on the interior walls. The exterior walls are finished with more durable stucco.

The two-bedroom, one-bath home, with flower gardens inside and out, just came on the market for $359,000.

Earthships are a type of energy efficient home first developed by Michael Reynolds near Taos, N.M. Their essential characteristics include maximizing passive solar energy gain. They are typically bermed or built into a hillside to also take advantage of the heat stored in the earth.

The building materials lend themselves to curvilinear interior walls, described in the Earthship lingo as "U's," Titus said.

Titus said the walls, built by stacking tires flat like overlapping bricks, pull heat from the earth and typically remain at 55 degrees even in winter.

Her home is not off the grid - Yampa Valley Electric Association serves the Willow Creek Pass neighborhood, and Titus has a propane tank for heat. However, on a sunny winter day, two large windows that face southeast and are banked at 45 degrees gather impressive amounts of passive solar heat.

She spends about $1,600 a year on propane, and her monthly electric bill is about $40. Titus said it was built to accommodate installation of solar panels.

In addition to relying heavily on solar heat, she spent extra money to install a nontoxic membrane on her flat roof, which allows her to collect rain and snowmelt in twin underground 1,500 gallon tanks. She pumps the found water to irrigate her vegetable and flower gardens. Even at 8,000 feet, she grows potatoes, broccoli, raspberries and garlic, among other plants.

The subdivision, which includes 130 dwellings, is part of the Steamboat Lake Water and Sanitation District, which plans to bring an additional well on line this summer that will afford ample supply to a buildout of about 300 houses.

Titus just happens to be president of the board of the water district.

Current taxes for water and sewer are $1,200 a year.

Prudential Steamboat Realty's Fryer said that after exploring the online community of Earthship followers, there are two sets of ideal buyers for Titus' home - a young couple that sincerely aspires to green living or a couple of empty nesters looking for a weekend getaway place that makes a great topic of conversation over dinner and wine, as well as being something to take pride in.

"There is a whole community of people, and there are databases of people interested in this sort of thing," Fryer said. "It's a really unique opportunity. It could be a young couple or single person who are very much environmentalists and seek the satisfaction of getting a home that meets their beliefs."

The interior of the home is inviting with its sinuous walls, umber-colored adobe and cobalt blue tiles serving in place of baseboard.

A skylight over the living room couch admits a shaft of light but also is a critical piece of the ventilation plan for every Earthship.

Titus served as her own general contractor when her Earthship was built in 1996. She relied on an expert Earthship framing crew and a specialized engineer who could calculate the integrity of the tire walls. However, she did much of the hard work herself, packing clay mixed with sand between the tire voids and applying the adobe in coats of one-quarter inch at a time.

TIC allowed her to collect her 3,000 15-inch tires in its yard on Elk River Road, and her boss, John Roos, allowed her to burn seven weeks of vacation time, three hours at a time. That allowed her to leave work early every day to touch base with her subs, then work until 10 p.m. before commuting to the home she was living in, in South Routt.

So, it will be tough to give up the Earthship, but Titus and her boyfriend are making other plans as they anticipate retirement, and she's coming to terms with the prospect of abandoning ship.

"I really do have an emotional connection to it," she said. "When you're outside, you can hear the aspens moving, and you can hear the wind in the pines."

But the best experience the Earthship has to offer just might be falling asleep in front of its steeply angled bank of windows.

"I'll tell you what, the night skies here - it's like camping out," Titus said.