Rodents on the Range: The Treasure House
Weaving among the shrubs and cacti, I came upon a very strange structure, something I had not seen before. I wondered: what animal built this curious house?
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Women You Should Know: The Grandmother of the Conservation Movement
From a childhood in remote Alaska trekking 400-miles on dogsleds to receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, read more about the fascinating life of Margaret Thomas Murie, “The Grandmother of...
Ranchlands Today
In the Unknown Certainty of Tomorrow It is November 1999. I am standing in the Chico Basin ranch corrals, watching […]
Rodents on the Range: The North American Porcupine
It is winter on the Chico Basin Ranch. Winter is the best time to find porcupines as the trees have […]
Water is King
Water is the most crucial tool in establishing a regenerative, rotational grazing operation on a large scale.
A Timeless Pursuit
A lone hunter weaves his way through the sagebrush islands pockmarking the sand of the San Luis Valley. He left at daybreak, just as he has on countless autumn mornings...
Birding at the Chico with David Tønnessen
David Tønnessen has already made quite a name for himself in the Colorado birding community. He recorded the first sighting of a tropical king bird in the state of Colorado...
Wildness Incarnate
“The Crane is wildness incarnate. High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks… a new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of...
Bugs, Biodiversity, and Big Ranches
Over the last few years, Chico Basin Ranch has partnered with the Mile High Bug Club (Pikes Peak Region chapter) to make a casual assessment of the diversity of insects,...
Self Selection
I was first introduced to the term “self-selection” in a barefoot trimming clinic in Australia about a year ago. The couple that were hosting the clinic, a trimmer and a...
Our Summer Reading List
From epic novels about the “old West” to meditations on the natural world and humanity’s place in it, from horsemanship instructionals to our favorite cookbooks, a (non-comprehensive) list of titles...
The Cottonwood
In the words of Willa Cather–at Ranchlands, we feel like the cottonwood is “bound up with our lives”.
Regenerative Ranching: Old Mojo in a New Age
What do we mean when we use the term “regenerative agriculture”? In our view, it is a coalescing of people who care and are actively doing something about the ecological...
Monitoring our Impact on the Land
There is more than one way to know a place. There is more than one way to see a landscape. There is more than one way to understand land health....
Sunburns and Swifties
When I was tasked with finding and photographing some of the resident swift foxes at Chico Basin Ranch, I suspected that I would be spending a lot of time doing...
Beefmasters: The Fertile Cow
Of all the diverse classes of cattle we have on the Chico, our mother cows work the hardest.
Beefmasters: The Bull
The Beefmaster bull is a symbol of strength and resilience in a herd that is built for production, endurance, and efficiency.
Beefmasters: A Philosophy Embodied
A Beefmaster cow is more that an animal; she is a management philosophy embodied – a flesh-and-blood way of living with the land that represents how humans and their animals...
Elk Encounters
Wildlife biologist Wes Larson, also known as Griz Kid for his frequent work with bears, spent some time at the Zapata tracking down and photographing a few of the ranch’s...
