It’s easy to take a long view from Colorado’s Chico Basin Ranch.
Thirty miles northwest, the 14,115-foot Pikes Peak glows white with a leftover heavy winter coat of snow, towering above Colorado Springs, the nearest city, about 20 miles away. Due south about 100 miles, the legendary twin volcanic prominences of the Spanish Peaks anchor the skyline, made famous almost a century ago by Western author Zane Grey. To the east, a limitless horizon stretches a thousand miles from this quiet vale in a broad valley, on the westernmost verge of the Great Plains.
On a sunny, 65-degree morning, it’s a blissful place to just be present in the here and now.
But focus a bit and you might also glimpse the future. In a land where pioneers of many kinds have established new ways for centuries, the managers at Chico Basin are pioneering what they believe is a more thoughtful, respectful, and productive way to operate a High Plains ranch, relying on old methods (raising cattle) and 21st-century adaptations such as opening the ranch to birdwatchers from nearby cities.
A New Way of Ranching
Look beneath the waist-high cholla cactus and you’ll see buffalo grass that has been lightly grazed on. The low-growing, protein-rich plant once sustained 50 million bison on the Great Plains, and it now sustains Chico Basin’s herd of 2,000 Beefmaster mother cows—a somewhat modest herd size for the ranch’s 87,000 acres.
Look past the cholla and you might see birdwatchers trundling by in an electric SUV, on the lookout for meadowlarks, prairie falcons, black-crowned night herons, burrowing owls, and the other 350 or so species that have been sighted here. Avian fans pay a modest daily fee or an annual pass to the ranch, which entitles them to cruise the property to practice their hobby.
Watch above the cholla and you’ll see ranch guests going by on paint horses and quarter horses as they head out to help ranch hands conduct daily chores. They’ll repair fences, move and sort cattle, and even take part in calf brandings. In the evening, they might cast a line for bass or bluegill in the five small lakes on the property.
Wander inside one of the numerous side buildings at ranch headquarters and you’ll find two artisans tooling leather goods for sale under the ranch’s brand banner, ranging from belts to bags to bracelets. On a weekend, the ranch might host retreats and workshops on topics ranging from spiritual growth to cooking to fiber dyeing.
All these supplemental income programs allow Chico Basin, and Ranchlands—the family company that manages Chico Basin as well as an assortment of other ranch properties from Texas to Wyoming—to use the land sparingly and make sure its core business, cattle-raising, imposes a light footprint on this sturdy but still perishable landscape. Among other things, ancillary income streams help Ranchlands managers adjust cattle operations to environmental exigencies such as drought. Ordinarily, cattle-raising represents about half of Chico Basin’s revenue.
Other cash streams also enable practices such as grazing exclusion zones that have brought back native plants like cottonwoods, bulrushes, and willows to Chico Basin’s water courses and lakes. And that brings birds, which bring birdwatchers, and so on, in steadily broadening circles.
“What’s best for the land is also what’s best for the business, and vice versa,” declared Tess Leach, business development manager for Chico Basin and Ranchlands. But Leach, daughter of Ranchlands founder Duke Phillips III, and the company at large see even further than just good business. They believe that exposing non-farm Americans to this portion of the nation’s agricultural community helps broaden their understanding of the entire food system, and of a shrinking but still strong way of life that is an American icon. Thank Zane Grey and John Wayne for that, sure, but birdwatchers?
“Our open-gate policy enables many things,” said Ms. Leach, expressing a philosophy most private ranchers would not adopt. “It’s a great way to help break down the barriers between urban and rural communities in the U.S.”
Opening Up the Ranch Gates
Ranchlands opened its gates when it bid to manage the property more than 20 years ago. The ranch represents about a half-dozen once-separate private parcels now owned by the Colorado State Land Board; Ranchlands operates it under contract, as it does the 100,000-acre Zapata Ranch in Colorado’s scenic, high-elevation San Luis Valley, a property owned by The Nature Conservancy. Both locations practice similar strategies to achieve fiscally viable conservation, although Zapata focuses more on its 2,000 bison than on cattle and offers lodging in a 15-room, 1920s-style, deeply atmospheric log house set amid towering cottonwoods. Chico Basin guests stay in a more typical ranch bunkhouse, an updated version of what used to be called a “line shack.”
Now, Ranchlands is embarking on a new program that old-line ranchers a century ago would have found wifty, to say the least: membership. In what? The Ranchlands Collective, an organization best described as a lifestyle affinity auxiliary, resembling similar groups at enterprises ranging from estate vineyards to rock bands to motorcycle companies.
Ranchlands members pay fees ranging from $5 to $100 and receive updates on the ranches and ranching, merchandise and lodging discounts, retreat invitations, and the right to attend the group’s annual summit at one of the ranches.
“Our mission is to help people understand the importance of these special places in the American landscape,” explained Kate Matheson, manager at the massive, historic Zapata Ranch, which features an awesomely scenic setting at 7,500 feet in an old-growth cottonwood grove beneath 14,351-foot Blanca Peak. Aside from cattle rearing, Zapata has for 40 years been the home of a herd of plains bison that is being steered ever closer to a pure genetic strain from the cattle-blended lineage many bison herds held a century ago. “We’re getting real close to 100 percent purity,” Ms. Matheson reported. “We want people to be involved and understand what we’re doing here.”
The Future Is in Sight
And how will Ranchlands propel its vision into the future? “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work,” said legendary business theorist Peter Drucker. At Ranchlands, that idea is the foundation of the company’s apprenticeship program, which schools its enrollees in the Phillips family way of running ranches. Interested students (mostly liberal arts majors, Ms. Leach pointed out) spend several months on the ranches as interns and are paid a small stipend. If ranch life still appeals to them, they become paid apprentices for two to four years, after which, if they stick it out, the company guarantees them a job at Chico Basin, Zapata, or one of the three other private properties operated by Ranchlands in Texas, New Mexico, or Wyoming.
Back at Chico Basin, Spanish Peaks and Pikes Peak have both served as guideposts during the long history of human habitation of the High Plains. The Comanche considered the Spanish Peaks sacred landmarks and called them “Huajatolla” (“breasts of the earth”); wayfarers on the Santa Fe Trail welcomed them as the first sight of the Rocky Mountains. Decades later, gold seekers welcomed the first glimpse of Pikes Peak, which meant that they were days away from their promised land. At Zapata, Blanca Peak—fourth highest in Colorado—is considered by the Navajo to be the easternmost point of their ancestral homelands; they call it “White Shell Mountain.” According to their legends, it is covered in daylight and dawn and fastened to the ground by lightning.
So the stature of all three peaks as beacons stretches far back, and perhaps far ahead. “My dad likes to say, ranchers are the original conservationists,” Ms. Leach declared. “In our family, it’s how we’ve always run things.”
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
