While Taylor duked it out in court in the 1970s and '80s, his neighbor Forbes found a novel way to harness property rights to conservation and improve community relations in the process. You can still find old-timers in Costilla County who speak fondly of Forbes; some of Taylor's fiercest opponents wear baseball caps that proclaim, "Forbes: Capitalist Tool." Forbes' way of dealing with community problems was to hire locals at top wages and integrate them into the operation of an increasingly successful trophy-hunting ranch. That, in turn, was built on Colorado's Ranching for Wildlife program, an innovation established by Forbes and his ranch managers--the remarkable father-son team of Errol and Ty Ryland--in 1986.
Until that year, the 150,000-acre Trinchera Ranch was in decline. Cattle weren't paying the bills; the only realistic option, it seemed, was to subdivide the land into ranchettes. Nothing could match the glitter and gold of real estate sales--nothing, that is, until the Rylands gave their boss a money-making idea. Already committed to phase one of Trinchera's subdivision, Forbes put a proposition before Colorado's game commission: He would stop all subdivision on Trinchera for his fair share of the licenses the state issued for hunting free-ranging elk. The game commission said yes, but with one condition: Forbes would have to give public hunters rights of access to his private lands during the general hunting season.
In a state where the government had always owned the wildlife and where game ranching for private purposes had been strictly forbidden, the agreement was revolutionary. The plan, soon adopted by more than 30 of Colorado's largest ranches, created a contingent private property right in trophy big-game licenses. Participating landowners were given (with their input) a biologically sustainable number of big game hunting licenses. In exchange, they managed ranchlands for wildlife, not just livestock, and shared a stick out of their bundle of property rights with the hunting public.
Ranching for Wildlife is what keeps Trinchera intact today, just as it keeps intact similar ranches. It also gives landowners an incentive for good stewardship: The number of big game licenses landowners receive is commensurate with the number of acres and the ecological quality of their land.
The price is opening private land to limited hunting by the general public during the regular hunting season. In the case of elk, the state conducts a public lottery for 10 percent of the bull licenses, with special breaks for local hunters in certain areas. For the price of a $35 hunting license, ordinary people get a shot at the same trophy bulls that ranch clients are paying up to 250 times more to shoot.
Nonetheless, the private licenses are valuable. Prior to Ranching for Wildlife, private ranches hosted hunts, but not for the big dollars they now earn. Before, they could charge prospective hunters fees to hunt on private land, but they couldn't provide them with hunting seasons separate from that of the general public, extended hunting seasons to suit their schedules, or hunts at more optimal times when bagging a trophy animal might be more likely. Also, landowners didn't control the number and allocation of the licenses that would authorize hunters to hunt their lands. This weakened their bargaining position. All that made it too risky and unprofitable for landowners to develop recreational amenities like those at Trinchera, which commands about $8,000 per elk hunt and $50,000 per bighorn sheep hunt.
Under the new system, elk, cougars, bears, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep are no longer just pests that prey on cattle or eat the grass cows need. They are assets, earning landowners double or triple the dollar return on cattle. This has made wildlands, not subdivisions, the most attractive proposition in many parts of Colorado.
Indeed, Ranching for Wildlife has given ranchers incentives to reintroduce wild species to their lands. Before the program, there were no bighorn sheep in the Sangre de Cristos. Under the policy umbrella of Ranching for Wildlife, Forbes was able to reintroduce the bighorn, steward their health and numbers, and eventually receive the only authorized licenses for bighorn hunting in that area. (This meant that landowners who had not invested in the sheep's recovery could not ride free on Forbes' success.)
Since 1986, Ranching for Wildlife has spread throughout Colorado, in large part because both hunters and regulators realize its value in keeping wildlife habitat intact. It came to the Taylor Ranch in the early 1990s, bringing a financial boon for the Taylors, a conservation boost for wildlife, and a chance for local hunters to attain a world class hunt for the price of a dinner and a movie. Ranching for Wildlife not only improved environmental conditions on the Taylor Ranch, it helped stop poaching. Locals, whose poaching activities had, according to Colorado's Division of Wildlife, seriously reduced the elk herd in the 1980s, now had controlled but legal access to high-valued elk. For the first time, the ranch's wildlife was paying its own way, a key point for the estate tax-strapped Taylor family.
While Ranching for Wildlife was establishing itself on the Taylor Ranch, endangered species lawsuits virtually shut down logging on western public lands, driving timber prices from a low of $40 per thousand board-feet in 1990 to more than $200 in 1994. Overnight, the ranch tripled in value--a blessing that was tempered by tripled tax obligations and the ever-escalating litigation costs of Rael v. Taylor. Federal and state agencies made a series of buyout proposals, none of which took the change in the land's value into account and all of which were rejected by the Taylor family.
Faced with dead deals and mounting debt, Zack Taylor began in 1996 to cut timber he had sold a few years earlier at top market prices. Incensed by Taylor's brazen defiance of the community's claims to the timber of La Sierra, the Land Rights Council ratcheted up its legal assault. The more it sued, the more timber Taylor had to cut to pay his legal bills; the more he cut, the louder grew the screams that he was raping the land.
In an ill-fated move, the Land Rights Council sought support from the fringe of the Anglo environmentalist movement. Soon, members of the Boulder-based Ancient Forest Rescue were chaining themselves to the Taylor Ranch gates, claiming that "the clearcutting of pristine old-growth forests" was destroying a unique and valuable culture, damaging the Rio Culebra watershed, and threatening an endangered species. None of these claims turned out to be true, but anyone who challenged them was branded as anti-environment and racist to boot.
In October 1997, Federal Judge Gaspar Perricone heard the latest version of Rael v. Taylor in San Luis. He denied all class action claims and ordered yet another trial to test the individual claims of a handful of the remaining heirs of 1851. His subsequent decision not only denied all claims to the ranch but reversed his 1997 decision to consider individual claims. Except for a lingering and desperate appeal by the Land Rights Council, Rael v. Taylor was over at last.
What is not over is the saga of the Taylor Ranch, and the promising future it could offer the people of San Luis and the wildlife of La Sierra.
For much of La Sierra's recent history, the high elevation spruce-fir forests that ring Culebra Peak have been the grandest prize, and the greatest bone of contention, among the parties warring over title to the mountain tract. Jack Taylor clearcut sizable chunks of the ranch--up to 500 acres in a single cut--in the 1970s. Evidence of those cuts persists, and the likelihood of at least some damage to species and watershed is almost certain. Zack Taylor is logging the ranch today, albeit with a more benign strategy of select cuts that leaves the spruce-fir forests visually and ecologically intact and the watershed relatively unaffected. For his opponents, this amounts to rape and plunder. They point to Culebra Peak and bemoan the disappearance of presumed pristine and ancient stands of spruce and fir.
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