Influx of Newcomers to the West Puts the Squeeze on Ranchers

After four days of rounding up cattle from the grasslands high above his mountain valley ranch, Ken Spann drives his steers across Highway 135, leaving a cloud of swirling dust.

It is an annual rite of fall, as Spann and his hands, on horseback, push the last of the black angus cows to the range where they will graze for the winter.

But in the central Rockies of Colorado, where cowboys and cows once roamed in solitude amid wildflowers and silver sage, it now takes but a minute for lines of cars to back up in both directions, waiting for Spann’s herd to pass.

Welcome to the New West.

From Montana to New Mexico, ranchers whose families have ridden the range for generations are watching their way of life fade like a wrangler’s pair of well-worn jeans.

Some have called it the second conquest of the West, the scarring spread of urban sprawl, a battle of cows against condominiums. It’s newcomers buying land and bringing new values and visions.

“When I was a kid, there wasn’t a house that you could see out here,” much less a traffic jam, says Spann, 46, the fifth generation to run the family ranch of more than 4,500 acres in the northern Gunnison Valley, 250 miles from Denver.

But today, not only do houses clutter the hillsides, a ski lodge and booming tourist town also lie a few miles down the highway. And across Spann’s northern range, riverfront lots are being sold for $300,000 apiece on land that not long ago was a 284-acre ranch.

When it went on sale, Spann and a neighbor, Bill Trampe, were interested, but the $1.3-million price was out of reach--for ranchers, anyway.

“There used to be 14 ranchers in the valley from Almont to Crested Butte. Now there are three. The land values have gotten so great that cows couldn’t pay for them,” says Trampe, 50, leaning across the kitchen table in his house down the highway from Spann’s corrals.

Three decades ago, Trampe left college after his father died to operate his family’s 6,000-acre ranch. Like Spann, he runs about 1,000 cattle on private and public grazing land and makes a decent living.

But both worry it may all disappear in the next generation.

Since the decade’s start, more than 2 million people have moved into the eight mountain states from Montana to Arizona, according to the Census Bureau. The region has grown by nearly 15%, 2 1/2 times the national average.

Crested Butte, pop. 1,464, is in the midst of a tourist boom. And 24 miles down the highway in Gunnison, Boeing 757 jetliners bring in winter skiers.

It is not only tourists.

Thousands of new faces, new ideas and new values have arrived: Retirees seeking a retreat, the wealthy searching for playgrounds, baby boomers embracing nature, professionals abandoning cities in an age of instant communications, and environmentalists proclaiming a love of the land that can clash with ranchers’ view of stewardship.

“We’re getting urban sprawl and it’s the worst kind”--35-acre ranchettes, often with absentee landlords, says Gary Sprung, an environmental activist who has lived in Crested Butte for 17 years.

While Sprung himself might be viewed by old-timers as an interloper, his fears are much the same as those of longtime ranchers.

With more people and more sewage, “the water quality of that river is changing and it’s not for the better,” Spann says, pointing to a stream that cuts through his range.

Spann is a mixture of old and new: At home on horseback riding the hills to round up strays, he also has a law degree and uses a computer to track each cow’s age and calves.

He also is among the growing number of ranchers who believe in accommodation. “We have to think where we’ll be 10 years from now,” says Spann. “How do we engage so we’re part of the solution, not the problem? How do we stay at the table?”

That means new alliances, including some that once would have been heresy: Working with, instead of fighting, environmentalists.

Not long ago Trampe began working with conservationists to develop ways ranchers could put their land into conservation trusts, meaning it could be used for ranching but not sold for development. They hope to get as much as $10 million from a state lottery fund to buy environmental easements.

It is an approach gaining favor across the West. Along the New Mexico-Arizona border, ranchers known as the Malpai Group have worked with the Nature Conservancy to set aside land and keep it from becoming subdivisions.

Increasingly, ranchers realize that taking better care of the land “can help the bottom line,” says Charles Wilkinson, a history professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And environmentalists recognize “helping these guys stay in business is going to help the environment.”

But not all embrace such alliances.

“We still have some of the die-hards out there that say, ‘I’m going to rule until I drop dead,’ ” Trampe says. “It’s more attitude than anything.”

And others are just starting to feel the crunch.

About 70 miles to the south--as the eagle flies--in the wind-swept San Luis Valley, rancher Jim Coleman grazes his 1,300 cattle on private land just outside Saguache (pronounced Sow-WATCH), pop. 584, and on three ranges under lease in the Rio Grande National Forest.

The sun was just coming up on a recent Sunday when Coleman and his son, Tim, headed up near the Continental Divide to bring 18 strays down before winter. On the return, the trailer’s door opened and a calf fell onto the highway. “It was skinned a little,” he says, but otherwise unhurt.

It’s been that kind of year.

Stretching across a plateau 7,000 feet above sea level, the San Luis Valley is whipped by strong winds. In winter the temperature can drop to 40 below zero, and for the last two summers, drought has burned up the cows’ favorite buffalo grasses.

The winds and the cold--”It’s a dry cold,” he says--are nothing new to Coleman. But other problems are.

Not far from his ranch, 35-acre parcels of almost-desert land are up for sale. It’s marginal land and the rancher just couldn’t make it. But Coleman worries who might move in.

“Over there in Tracy Canyon they fence your cattle out of the water,” he says of other newcomers, who have moved in where once there was only range land.

“Californians are moving to Colorado by the bunches. It’s everywhere. . . . I’m doing my best not to get squeezed too hard.”