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SAN LUIS — For more than 150 years, going back to when this high desert of sandy arroyos and snow-capped peaks was ceded by Mexico, they have gone to “the mountain” as part of their survival.
Like their ancestors who settled in the San Luis Valley before it was even Colorado, the descendants still gather firewood and graze their livestock on what they call “La Sierra” — more than 100 square miles of juniper and piñon pine forest rising to a 20-mile stretch of the saw-toothed Sangre de Cristo range.
That was the deal made when the valley was subdivided in the mid-1800s. The settlers each got a plot of desert with access to an acequia irrigation ditch, and they were allowed to go into the high country to harvest timber, hunt deer and elk, and graze their cattle and sheep.
The arrangement for the heirs of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1844 has remained mostly in place even as a line of wealthy men have purchased the land — not always peacefully, but with court battles, armed security guards, suspected arson and even a shooting.
Now, the battle line between the current billionaire landowner, who is the son of a Texas oil baron, and the few thousand descendants with a legal right to use the land is a fence.
A wire grid, 8 feet high and lined with barbed wire across the top and bottom.
Some compare it to a prison yard.
The fence — which has become a symbol of wealth inequality, and a not-so-subtle reminder that the age-old, range-war struggles over land use and private property never die — is so tall that deer have been separated from their fawns. Locals say they watch deer and elk run alongside the wire searching for a place to cross. The fence’s wire squares get smaller as the fence nears the ground, narrowing to 3.5-inch openings that observers say are too small for a coyote or even a wild turkey to squeeze through.
The bulldozer that cut a 20-foot-wide gash to make way for the fence created not only an eyesore, locals complain, but diverted water that’s now carving deep canyons in the sand instead of spreading across the landscape. Irrigation ditches on ranches at the base of the mountains clog with sand whenever it rains as sediment pours down the foothills.
William Harrison, who purchased the land in 2017 after it was listed for $105 million, counters that trespassers have entered his private property to dump trash and collect antlers, to fish illegally and ride ATVs. It’s his right as a landowner to keep them out, he argues, especially since the descendants of the original settlers have keys to nine gates through which they can enter the property. He built the fence to prevent illegal trespassing by people with no access rights, and to contain his herd of bison, which locals estimate at about 60 animals.
Costilla County commissioners, backed by scores of San Luis Valley residents who have turned county hearings into shouting matches, won a one-year moratorium on fence building in state district court. The temporary injunction runs out in September.
Harrison, 37, was forced to stop before finishing the perimeter along his 88,000-acre property, which a previous owner named Cielo Vista Ranch, or view of heaven. Locals say they never see him in town and only speculate that he’s arrived when they see his helicopter. They estimate Harrison built about 20 miles of fence line before a judge ordered him to stop.
As both sides prepare for a trial this fall to decide the fate of the fence, tension is running high along the perimeter.
“What’s hard for us living here on a daily basis to internalize and verbalize is the psychological impact,” asked Shirley Romero Otero, whose Jicarilla Apache ancestors were among the first settlers to the valley. “Are we being kept out? Or who is being caged in? He’s doing this to us because he’s always treated this community as second-class citizens.
“The bottom line is he wants to keep us access holders from accessing our rights, and that is never going to happen.”
Cielo Vista Ranch, outlined in red, encompasses 18 peaks 13,000 feet or higher and the 14,053 foot Culebra Peak. About 20 miles of 8 foot-high fencing has been constructed separating the ranch from people in the San Luis Valley who have historic rights to access it. (Kevin Jeffers, The Colorado Sun)
Cameras and drones along the fenceline keep track of trespassers. Land grantees, who are allowed to enter with a key at nine gates that cross roads into La Sierra, say they’ve been harassed by the ranch’s armed security guards.
The ranch manager’s house, which is not on the ranch, was shot up with bullet holes in the night several months back, Sheriff Danny Sanchez said. No one has been charged.
And a land rights holder whose homesteaded ranch backs up to Cielo Visto was hit with a civil trespassing charge, threatening a fine of up to $100,000, last month after he and his wife rode horses onto the land to check on their grazing cattle. Eli Rael, 60, whose Apache grandparents came from New Mexico to raise sheep on the mostly arid landscape, said he was told he was photographed in November as he checked on his cows. He never saw the camera.
Harrison is just the latest adversary in the people’s fight to use “the mountain.” The tale dates back to the 1960s, when a North Carolina lumberman bought the land that had been passed down from the first territorial governor of Colorado, William Gilpin, and started putting up a barbed-wire fence.
Harrison has been portrayed as a demon for trying to protect his property, said his attorney, Jamie Cotter, even though Harrison sat down in 2019 with descendants of the original settlers in an attempt to work through their disagreements. “There has been a consistent attempt to dehumanize and demonize Mr. Harrison since he purchased the ranch,” Cotter said. “It makes it much easier to hate someone when they are not thought of as human.”
“The first thing I see is that big old fence”
Since the new fence appeared along the back of Rael’s property, he’s seen fewer elk and deer, mountain lion and coyotes. He thinks they are trapped on the other side. He recently saw a dead skunk on the Cielo Vista side of the fence and wondered if it died of thirst trying to reach the creek that runs through his property.
Rael is one of 23 small ranch owners whose land connects to Cielo Vista and who have private gates that allow their cattle to graze on the mountain. Rael’s herd wanders up the mountainside to graze and visit a natural salt lick, then returns home through the gate. It’s been this way for more than 100 years.
Residents fear, based on previous court proceedings, that Harrison wants to lock those private gates, which means ranchers with land grant rights would have to move their cattle to one of the nine gates for which all land grantees have a key. This could mean pushing cows down county roads on horseback, then going to find them in the fall, because they would no longer know their way home.
There has been a consistent attempt to dehumanize and demonize Mr. Harrison since he purchased the ranch. It makes it much easier to hate someone when they are not thought of as human.
— Jamie Cotter, attorney for William Harrison
My theory is that he put the fence up because he’s a billionaire. It’s a way of him marking the territory of his prized possession, a vanity thing. And it makes zero sense.
— Joseph Quintana, a descendent of the first settlers of the San Luis Valley
This fight over the private gates — one of many battles in the decades-old war — is the subject of a court hearing next month in Alamosa.
Rael joined five other descendants with land rights a few years ago to create the La Sierra Environmental Guardians Committee. A Denver law firm is representing them pro bono, and Rael has asked the firm to help with his trespassing case.
On a recent April day, Rael eased his pickup truck over the bumps in his cattle pasture in an attempt to spill as little water as possible from a tank of creek water in the truck bed. He was hauling it to his bull, which was separated from the cows and calves during calving season.
At the back of his property, where mountain meets valley, sections of his old fence were strewn on the ground amid the sagebrush. Workers from the Cielo Vista Ranch tossed the old fence aside when they came through with the bulldozer to make the new fence last year, he said.
“They came and tore up my fence without asking or anything,” Rael said, shaking his head.
From one direction, Rael has a spectacular view of snow-capped Culebra Peak, a 14,000-foot mountain that rises above the 18 thirteener mountains in La Sierra, all on Cielo Vista property. From the other direction, he sees the new fence.
“Every morning I get up and look out the window and the first thing I see is that big old fence,” he said. “My living room window, the bedroom window, the kitchen window.”
Just up the road in the village of San Francisco, the fence nearly surrounds an old, hilltop cemetery and the town’s morada, a traditional Mexican religious building made from adobe. Since the 1870s, Catholics have carried a cross up into the hills on Good Friday, marking the death of Jesus Christ.
The fence blocks the way.
The fence is to keep out trespassers, not land grantees, owner says
Like the two landowners before him, Harrison has allowed hikers to climb Culebra Peak, the tallest mountain on his property and one of Colorado’s 58 peaks above 14,000 feet. Climbers who want to summit the 14,053-foot peak must buy a single-day permit for $150, according to the Cielo Vista Ranch website.
The ranch also has offered guided, five-day elk hunts, which, in 2017, were advertised at $10,000.
Harrison is a land conservationist who comes from a long line of Texas cattle ranchers, his attorney, Cotter, said. Even though private fences are not required to include animal jumps, which are sections that are low enough for deer and elk to leap across, the ranch included them, she said. And the ranch agreed to add more jumps in a settlement with county commissioners, she said.
The people who “say very hateful things” and “dehumanize” Harrison are a small group who represent only a fraction of those living in San Luis Valley, Cotter said. Meanwhile, other landowners who share a property line with Cielo Vista have made “multiple requests” that the ranch put up a fence to keep the bison herd from traveling onto their land, she said.
“The fence is not designed and does not operate to keep people out who have valid access rights,” she said, adding that the ranch has “unquestionably” allowed access for people with keys to the nine gates.
The arroyos run deep, and they’re getting deeper
The climb is so steep in spots that Joseph Quintana bear crawls upward, digging his fingers into the sandy earth and occasionally grabbing hold of a sagebrush or piñon tree for leverage.
Across the gravel road from his home, where cottonwood trees line the banks of the creek, he climbs a mile upward to the boundary of Cielo Vista Ranch. It’s hard to miss, marked by the tracks of a bulldozer that rolled up and down steep slopes of the mountainside and left a 20-foot-wide trail of turned-up dirt and uprooted trees.
Standing atop a ridge under a nearly cloudless sky, the road of tan-colored dirt sticks out as it cuts a route through the forest, crossing ridge after ridge, for miles. The path was bulldozed to make way for the new fence, but that work halted with the county moratorium upheld by a district judge.
For now, the old string of barbed wire still stands along the broken earth.
Quintana recently retired as the only family physician in San Luis, population 618, which is why people call him “Doc.” For the past six months, he’s devoted his time to trying to stop the fence.
Thanks to the bulldozing, mountain runoff is reaching Vallejos Creek near his home “in the most destructive way possible,” Quintana said. He points to ruts in the bulldozed path that are 5 to 8 feet deep, ruts that capture the rainwater and snowmelt, then send it straight down the arroyos — or gullies — and to the dirt road at the base of the mountain. The runoff used to spread more evenly across the foothills, Quintana said.
The arroyos show signs of new erosion. The rain-carved channels are clogged with pine trees whose roots lost their hold as water washed away the sides of the gully. The sides of the arroyos in the hills above Quintana’s home are 10 feet high in spots, made of unstable dirt that looks ready to crumble with the next spring storm.
Quintana is desperate to show people this. He has asked the county, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and Colorado Parks and Wildlife to conduct environmental impact studies.
He wonders whether heavy metals like arsenic, mercury and phosphorus are now leaching faster from the mountain and reaching the valley’s water supply, already one of the most concerning water systems in Colorado in terms of safety. The committee of descendants fighting the fence is working on a grant proposal in the hopes of getting a nonprofit to pay for a water impact study.
“There is no rational reason for that kind of fence here,” said Quintana, who went to medical school while his brother took over the family cattle ranch. “Nobody is denying him the right to fence his property, but the type of fence he’s building is destructive in so many ways.”
Like other land grantees who have keys to the gates, Quintana has no kind words for ranch owner Harrison.
“My theory is that he put the fence up because he’s a billionaire,” he said. “It’s a way of him marking the territory of his prized possession, a vanity thing. And it makes zero sense.”
“These rights are set in stone”
The fight over the fence around Cielo Vista is a minor one in the context of the 150-year-old history of the land war.
For residents of the valley, Harrison is only the latest antagonist. Previous owners of the ranch, going back to at least 1960, have tousled with locals over land use rights.
Harrison bought Cielo Vista from a group of Texas investors, who had purchased the property from Lou Pai, the disgraced former CEO of Enron Energy Services. Before Pai, the ranch was owned by lumber baron Jack Taylor, who spent decades building a barbed-wire fence — small in comparison to today’s fence — around the property.
Locals with land grant rights sued Taylor in 1981, initiating what became Colorado’s longest-running lawsuit. This came 20 years after Taylor’s employees pistol-whipped three local residents who trespassed on his ranch and about 10 years after Taylor was shot in the ankle while he slept.
There have been four owners, all rich, white, privileged men, and the first thing they do is they change the name. We continue to call it La Sierra, the mountain, because that is what it’s been called since the mid-1800s.
— Romero Otero
In 1993, Taylor’s ranch house burned to the ground, a fire that was investigated but never proved as arson.
The lawsuit filed in 1981 was finally resolved in 2002, when the Colorado Supreme Court restored access to descendants of the homesteaders. The case continues today in district court, where a special master was appointed to help settle ongoing issues. For the descendants, the 2002 win was considered a partial victory because, while they could graze livestock and collect firewood, they could no longer hunt.
The ruling included a 15-year process of identifying the land grant heirs. The results concluded there are about 5,000 descendants of Spanish and Mexican homesteaders who had rights, though locals say there are only about 400-500 people who still use La Sierra.
After Harrison acquired the ranch in 2017, he sent letters to land grant heirs, offering $300 for their rights to the ranch. He also appealed the 2002 court ruling, arguing that the number of heirs allowed to use the land was overwhelming and causing destruction on his property.
The Colorado Court of Appeals denied Harrison’s request, and he decided in late 2018 not to pursue an appeal to the state supreme court. Instead, Harrison and the land rights heirs have attempted to work out their disputes under the purview of a Costilla County district judge.
It’s not going well.
Like many in San Luis, at 8,000 feet in elevation, Romero Otero uses firewood to heat her home. She goes up to “the mountain” to cut wood and she packs a lunch, even though she knows she doesn’t have “picnicking rights.” And while she eats her lunch, she puts her feet in Culebra Creek. “It’s the only time I really get to enjoy the spirit, the beauty of those waters,” she said. “Water is sacred for us.”
She is among those who refuse to call the land Cielo Vista. “There have been four owners, all rich, white, privileged men, and the first thing they do is they change the name,” she said. “We continue to call it La Sierra, the mountain, because that is what it’s been called since the mid-1800s.”
The fence is the latest affront to the people whose ancestors settled in the valley, she said, another chapter in a saga that seems to never end.
“Where in the world do you find private property that over 1,000 individuals literally have access to?” she said. “These rights are set in perpetuity. They’re set in stone. My children, our children, our grandchildren, our future generations will never have to litigate and fight for those rights.”
Billionaire vs. one of Colorado’s poorest counties
Sections of the new fence began to appear about four years ago.
And it wasn’t just the land grant heirs who despised it.
Costilla County hit Cielo Vista Ranch with a series of land-use violation notifications in 2022, but the fence building continued, said Ben Doon, chief administrative officer for the county commissioners. Then in September 2023, county commissioners voted unanimously to enact a moratorium on all fences over 5 feet high.
Cielo Vista ignored it. The ranch continued to build the fence, then sued Costilla County alleging that the moratorium was illegal.
The ranch lost in district court, where the judge granted a preliminary injunction against the fence in October 2023 and set the case for trial this fall. In the month between the county’s moratorium and the court ruling upholding it, Cielo Vista is alleged to have built “thousands of miles of fence.”
“They kept building as fast as they could,” Doon said. “They had three out-of-state companies working on it.
“Their initial reaction was, this is illegal, you have no right to do this, we’re going to ignore it and we’re going to sue you for it,” he said, referring to the moratorium. “Ever since then, they have just been belligerently fighting us.”
So far, the county has spent $80,000 on legal fees over the fence, an amount Doon said is only “scratching the surface.” The entire annual budget for the county is about $3 million.
Costilla County is the second-poorest in Colorado, based on the percentage of families living below the federal poverty line.
Commissioners oppose the fence, which Doon called “monstrous,” because they are concerned it’s disrupting regular migration patterns of wildlife and cutting them off from their regular water supply. Locals have collected video of panicked elk running along the fence and a wild turkey that paced back and forth.
Plus, the bulldozing removed topsoil and ripped out vegetation, causing more erosion events in an area already prone to slides.
“Without question, this is exacerbating the problem in that area,” Doon said. “There are new scars. It’s a steep mountain range and has loose rock.”
State agencies have been slow to get involved in the fence dispute. But the county received a copy of a letter that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s water quality division sent to the ranch in March. The letter warned of “potential violations of the Colorado Water Quality Control Act” because the ranch had not gotten a permit before starting a construction project that might disrupt water flow.
Cielo Vista obtained a permit April 12 to disturb 40 acres for the fence. A state health department spokesman told The Sun that an inspector plans to visit the site to determine whether the ranch is complying with the permit.
Fence doesn’t meet “wildlife friendly” recommendations
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has told the county and local residents, as well as The Colorado Sun, that it doesn’t have jurisdiction over the fence — no matter if it’s disrupting wildlife.
Counties, not the state, are the statutory authority on fences, said John Livingston, spokesman for Parks and Wildlife’s southwest region. The state agency could provide a “comment letter” about the county’s land-use code, if it were asked, but Costilla County has not asked for one, he said.
It’s clear, however, that the Cielo Vista fence does not fit within the state agency’s recommendations for a wildlife friendly fencing, which suggest fences are no more than 3.5 feet high — and even shorter on sloped ground because it’s harder for animals to jump without injury if they are trying to jump uphill. Parks and Wildlife also recommends at least 16 inches between the ground and the bottom wire of the fence, and at least a foot between the top two wires.
According to court records, the height of the Cielo Vista fence is about 8 feet. Its wire grid includes 5.5-inch squares at the top of the fence, and 3.5-inch squares at the bottom.
Wildlife managers also recommend that landowners include a wildlife jump, where the top of the fence is lower, at every 1,000 feet of fence line. But there are stretches of thousands of feet of Cielo Vista fence with no jumps.
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The son of Cielo Vista’s ranch manager testified in a county hearing that jumps in the fence were placed in areas long known by ranch hands as wildlife crossings. Carlos DeLeon Jr. said more jumps were planned but the moratorium disrupted that construction, according to the Alamosa Citizen.
DeLeon, the ranch manager, did not respond to requests for comment from The Sun.
In court, he testified that the point of the fence is to keep trespassers without legal land rights out of the ranch and to contain Harrison’s bison herd, which he said can jump 6 feet. Locals counter that the herd is not large enough to merit a wildlife-proof fence to close off the entire 88,000 acres.
DeLeon acknowledged that elk and deer struggle to jump the fence, but disagreed with residents who said small wildlife cannot pass underneath. Rabbits can fit through holes as small as 2 to 3 inches, according to experts.
“It looks like a prison”
When the case settles, the descendants of the original settlers hope there is an order to tear down the fence. Harrison should have to replace it with a wildlife-friendly one, they said.
No matter what happens, they say they will never get back what their ancestors had or even what they had growing up. Sheriff Sanchez, who used to go to the mountain to collect piñon nuts with his grandparents, doesn’t go to La Sierra anymore. He doesn’t even know where his gate key is.
Bernadette Lopez, whose family owns a group of cabins that abut the Cielo Vista property, won’t forget the day she first saw the fence. She was stunned by the bulldozed trees and the “overkill” of the 8 foot wire. Her family has watched as wild turkeys trot back and forth, looking for a way through.
“You look out from the deck and there’s a fence right there,” she said. “It looks like a prison.”