Ranching families circle the wagons to hold onto their space

By Lisa Levitt Ryckman
News Staff Writer

SAGUACHE -- Drive west on Colorado 114 to see some of the last of what's left to be saved.

Cattle line up for feed on a ranch near the mouth of the canyon leading west from Saguache along Colorado 114. Ten large landowners have joined to keep their 53-mile stretch of ranchland from ever being developed. It is the longest swath of undeveloped land left in Colorado.

It is redrock cliffs and wide open meadows and alpine forest and views that go on forever. And except for the asphalt ribbon that cuts across the Continental Divide, the landscape Jim Coleman surveys today is pretty much what his great-grandfather saw 120 years ago.

It is, by all accounts, the longest stretch of undeveloped land left in the state of Colorado, a pristine 53 miles of private property surrounded by public property, much of it national forest.

It belongs to the Colemans and the Nielsens and the Wades and the other ranch families whose relatives homesteaded on the land in the 1870s.

They have driven along the highway that runs through their property, until the road ends just outside Gunnison. There, they have seen land like theirs chopped into ranchettes and subdivisions. That vision of one possible future has been enough to unite these 10 families and their 33,000 acres.

"They've run all the ranchers out," Coleman said. "Between here and the other side of the Divide is the only open space.

"And we want to keep it thataway."

Downtown Saguache, population 687, bears testament to the difficulty of making a living off the land, and to the lure of the developer's dollar. The old hotel and many of the storefronts, once bustling, sit empty now. There is one restaurant. One school. One liquor store. One health clinic. One feed store. One bank.

But there are two real estate offices. If you want land, you're in luck.

"If you want a pair of socks, you're out of luck," Frances Coleman said. As she drives around town, she's never far from a piece of Coleman land, which hugs Saguache on three sides, nearly 3,000 acres. Sometimes she gets a call: one of their cows is eating somebody's lawn.

She and husband Jim, a fourth-generation Colorado rancher, have experienced the fallout from the Front Range's burgeoning urban sprawl in the form of newcomers to the valley, a place where for years there was no one they didn't know.

Now Frances is unsure who owns some of the land. "It's changed hands two or three times in the last five years."

They feel fortunate that their son, Tim, stayed to ranch; so many other young people have left.

"The ranchers were in the same situation we are," Jim Coleman said. "They saw all that money, and they're getting old -- hell, I'm 64 -- and they said, 'Why not?"'

The Colemans look no further than their own family to answer that question. Tim's son, 6-year-old Calvin, already considers himself the world's greatest cowboy.

"We don't want to sell to anybody. But if it comes down to it, we don't want to sell to a developer," Coleman said. "We just don't want to do it. We just hate 'em. With a passion."

Jim Coleman bottle-feeds a newborn calf on his Saguache ranch. Demand for nearby land is high among prospective buyers from the Front Range and around the nation.

The newest building in Saguache belongs to Ken Williams, whose Wilderness Realty did $4 million in business last year. There's plenty of vacant land around, and more demand every day.

The land out Colorado 114 captivates potential buyers, Williams said. To see it is to want it.

"And I waltz them right over to the map and say, OK, you can play in this place. But there's very little property to be purchased. And what does exist for the most part is ranch property."

Property that might never be developed, if the owners have their way.

Nobody seems to agree on who had the idea first, but Coleman and rancher Ed Nielsen were right at the heart of it, drumming up support for the notion of selling the development rights for all that private ranchland.

Retiring those rights through a conservation easement -- a contract that will keep the land open for all time. The land would still belong to their families, and it could still be grazed, farmed, bought and sold. But it could never be developed: the right to do that would be gone forever, held by a land trust.

"Ten years ago, I would have said no way," Nielsen said. "Five years ago, I decided I could live with it.

"Now I know you can make conservation easements whatever you want to make them. You're the author. Just know what the hell you're talking about. Because you will have to live with what you made."

The ranchers went to the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust, a fledgling group -- and, until recently, the only one of its kind in the nation devoted to buying development rights from ranchers.

Landowners who can afford to donate development rights receive tax benefits, but it's tougher to find a buyer for the rights. Great Outdoors Colorado, which spends lottery proceeds to buy open space, has been a key to helping Cattlemen's put together deals like this one.

"We all thought we'd died and gone to heaven to have a group of landowners come together like this," said Lynne Sherrod, Cattlemen's executive director. "We also knew there was no way we could do this on our own."

She suggested bringing in the Nature Conservancy, another group that tries to preserve land, and the ranchers agreed.

"They're very progressive," said Nancy Warner, who runs the regional Nature Conservancy office with her husband, Chuck, out of the same building where Annie Nielsen has her real estate office.

Nielsen has sold every kind of property in the county in the past 22 years, and she knows the value of her own family's land better than anyone: Hundreds of thousands of dollars as a subdivision -- priceless as the wide open space it has always been.

"They've seen the writing on the wall," Nancy Warner said. "And it says that as every one of their neighbors sells out to developers, it makes it increasingly difficult for them to stay in business."

Thirty years ago, the Colemans bought a parcel west of town, 540 acres of sage and cedar and rock. They paid $18,000, which they thought was pretty steep. They gave it up to the bank in 1988, and the bank sold it for $55,000, which all the ranchers around considered outrageous.

Recently, that 540 acres sold for nearly $500,000. And the developer who bought it just sold two 40-acre plots for $120,000 apiece.

"It's obscene for somebody who doesn't live here, doesn't grow up here, to make that much money and take it out of our community," Ed Nielsen said.

Williams was the agent who sold the two 40-acre lots between town and the Nielsens' place.

It's business, pure and simple. He has no patience with the complaints of ranchers who often reap big profits from their own land.

"You may like or dislike it all you want, but there is nobody, and I will repeat to you, nobody in the state of Colorado who can stop somebody from selling 35-acre parcels off their ground."

The land begins on the valley floor, open prairie rolling into gentle hills covered in piñon, cedar and sagebrush.

"That field's been overgrazed," Frances Coleman said, nodding at a dry yellow field stubbly with wild iris. "But the new owner's trying to bring it back. It'll take a few years."

Farther along, the foothills close in, and walls of sienna-colored rock line the road.

Then comes the Rio Grande National Forest, dense and green.

The area supports rare and unusual species of plants, insects and animals, which qualifies it for help from the Nature Conservancy.

"The only land ranked of higher significance in the San Luis Valley is the Great Sand Dunes National Monument," Chuck Warner said.

Turn around at the top of a ridge up Colorado 114 to see the dunes in the distance, an inland beach tucked between stretches of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The red glow on those peaks at sunset gave the range its name, the blood of Christ tinging the top of God's country.

"I like to go to bed at night, turn out the lights, and it's dark as far as I can see. I have control of that," Nielsen said.

Subdividing changes the color of the night and the lay of the land.

"The 40-acres subdivisions are going to break these rural counties," he predicted. "Where agriculture and vacant land still pays its way, subdivisions don't. And for your neighbors' sake, they don't want to ranch next to a subdivision. It's just too hard to put up with that many more people and their dogs."

Williams sorts through the information cards on his desk left by people who have come in, looking for a wide open space: Iowa, Kansas, Florida, New York -- but mostly, Colorado.

Development is coming, Williams said. It is inevitable.

"Go from Montrose to Ridgway. Go from Salida to Buena Vista. And if they don't think it can happen here, they're dreaming," he said. "Because those are nice places, and this is a beautiful place. If it happened in a nice place, I don't know what'll ever stop it from happening in a beautiful place."

The ranchers who own the best of what's left are hopeful they can preserve their corner of the world. They're working on it, together.

"There's got to be something left in this world that looks like it did 100 years ago," Nielsen said. "For the next 100 years."

March 28, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
© Copyright, Denver Rocky Mountain News