As real estate frenzy grips the West, conservationists scramble to save a disappearing landscape. There isn't much of the old Dos Rios Ranch wooded pasture left, but here are acres of trees and ponds to be enjoyed among the birds and deer that still call it home. It's just outside town and may be the best ranch real estate available in the Gunnison Country.
The most heart-wrenching losses happen one piece of land at a time, one family at a time. The old man dies. The real estate is a mess. The kids have other jobs. They can't afford the taxes. Or other alternatives - just about any kind of investment, even a savings account - are more enticing. So they set the land for sale, subdivided. The meadow is carved up. Homes go up along the edge of the woods. People move on. Others move in. And something goes out of the place, never to return.
It's happening all over the West all the time. And every time a land for sale sign goes up, it's a heart-wrenching loss for some, a boon for others. There is a shared sense of loss. But who's to judge? Things change. It's a family's ranch land. It's private property.
But wait a minute. Step back for a moment. Way back. Away from this piece of land. Float up above this meadow and this valley. Take in the entire watershed. Keep going until you can see the whole state. And then the whole West.
Roughly half of the West is public land for sale. And that means the other half is private land properties. And most of those private land properties are ranches. At this scale, outside of the big cities, it is nearly impossible to distinguish which is which, though you can make some informed guesses: The ranch land are the valley bottoms, along rivers and streams, where water is plentiful, not too high up in the mountains, and not too low down in the deserts. In short, a lot of the best, most productive lands in the West are riverfront properties, or mountain land for sale. And if suddenly the ranch land were, say, highlighted in red, a lot of your hunches would be dramatically confirmed. The ranch land would look something like the veins and arteries in the living body of the West, largely following the branching structure of watersheds.
If the public land is the body of the West, its circulation system is the ranch land. And that ranch land is being transformed before our eyes.
Since 1980, the population of the 13 Western states has risen by more than 20 million, or 47 percent. That's about twice the growth rate of the United States as a whole.
The fastest-growing parts of the West are rural, not urban or suburban areas, according to an analysis of census data by David Theobald, a geographer at Colorado State University.
The conversion of ranch land from agriculture to residential, commercial and industrial use is taking place at an even faster rate than population growth. In the West, the amount of ranch land carved up and swallowed by development rose from 20 million acres in 1970 to 42 million acres in 2000. And the most attractive land left for development is the same land that is most productive for ranching and for wildlife: the mid-elevation, best-watered land in the West.
