Replacement ranch needed for storied Colorado family. 86,000 acres or best offer.  

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CHICO BASIN RANCH — With early January winds steadily shredding the Colorado flag outside to tatters, Duke Phillips III hunkers in a century-old ranch office behind 2-foot-thick walls of adobe-covered sod, and contemplates his to-do list.

As with any rancher or farmer with a heartbeat, the Phillips family to-do list is long enough to deny mere mortals months of sleep.

1. Round up 1,500 head of cattle, by horse and helicopter, from every corner of an 86,000-acre spread straddling two counties. 

2. Weigh them. Look into 1,500 mouths to age them with a tooth check. 

3. Teach ranch hand trainees how to do a rectal pregnancy check on each mature cow. This requires slow movements, kindness and plastic gloves stretching to the shoulder. 

4. Oh yes, and ask the grandkids the name of the ginger-calico cat haunting the saddle room, and see if it has the shots necessary for a cross-country trip. 

Because the biggest thing on the Phillips family’s to-do list right now is hitting the refresh button on real estate listing websites. They’ve lost their lease on Chico Basin Ranch after 24 years. The Phillipses also just lost their other Colorado business, managing bison and beef for The Nature Conservancy on the 100,000-acre Zapata Ranch next to the Great Sand Dunes. 

Within the year, they will be moving out of Colorado entirely, and finding a ranch anywhere from 10,000 acres to 500,000 acres where three generations can raise purebred Beefmaster cattle, conserve the land and make a living. 

Duke chews on most of his words before he releases them from under his walrus mustache. When the words do come out of the chute, they are shorn of emotion but packed with meaning. 

“We’re feeling displaced,” Phillips said. 

Right process, harsh results? 

Through decades of Colorado blizzards, drought, gales and prairie fires, the Phillipses have persevered to raise premium beef cattle, host 100,000 guests, put on marquee country concerts under the stars, and guide eager birders to the optimal migration pond. But in the bureaucracies of state government and progressive nonprofits, they have finally met their match. 

Colorado’s Land Board, which seeks revenue from Chico Basin and millions more acres of public land for the benefit of state schools, used the expiration of a 25-year master lease on the ranch to seek a boost in profits from a variety of bids.

The Nature Conservancy, meanwhile, wants to use historic Zapata to honor Indigenous buffalo culture through training Native American and Hispanic stewards of the land. 

Everyone seems to be trying to do the right thing. And yet the results are a stampede of unfairness for one family. 

“I know that they’ve been on Chico Basin for a long time — they’ve raised their families out there. So it is unfortunate for them and I feel badly for them,” said Nancy Fishbein, director of resilient lands for The Nature Conservancy. “They’re a very enterprising family. And I’m really hopeful that they’ll find their way into something else.”

For some big fans of the Chico Basin way over the past 24 years, changes have already begun. The Phillipses let bird watchers mix in with their agricultural operation year-round, and welcomed the binocular-touting hordes at spring and fall migration with detailed what-to-look-for pamphlets. (More than 350 species have been seen on the property, birders say.)

The land board instead initiated no-cost birding leases for local birding organizations that begin March 1. The leases impose a 10-week limit on birding time for the whole year. In those five spring and five fall weeks, birders are limited to 20 a day through pre-registration, and for only six hours, according to the Denver Field Ornithologists newsletter “The Lark Bunting.” 

Official port-a-potties are on the way, the disgruntled birders say. No more knocking on the ranch house door to use the Phillipses’ bathroom. 

“Whatever the season, Chico Basin was a good reason to go birding,” birder and newsletter editor Patrick O’Driscoll wrote in detailing the dreaded restrictions. “But not for long.”

The land board said it needed more formal birding leases to make sure they didn’t conflict with daily activities from the broader agriculture lease. 

Duke Phillips pondered that argument from behind the wheel of his pickup, next to Canada geese mincing across an icy pond. A herd of two dozen antelope bounded away from the pond road, flashing their white quarters against stalks of drying chamisa.  

“We, in 24 years and six figures of guests, have not had one single negative incident with the public,” Phillips said. “Not one. But the state acts out of fear.” 

Land board says it’s time for change

The Phillipses’ sense of being unfairly evicted from Chico Basin began as early as 2018. The ranch is one of the crown jewels of the state land board system, which puts 2.8 million acres of Colorado land under public management. 

The board has a dual mission of raising money for schools while also prioritizing landscape preservation and long-term protection of natural resources. That means the board need not accept the highest bidder for a lease, or accept potentially lucrative but damaging uses like mineral extraction on every acre of land. State lands are leased for everything from grazing to drilling to carbon sequestration studies to solar farms to hunting and fishing. 

Twenty-four years ago, the Phillips family operating Ranchlands won a comprehensive lease for Chico Basin Ranch, covering agriculture, recreation such as hunting and fishing, and hospitality, renting out a dude ranch experience with rooms in one of the old farmhouses. Along the way, the family prided itself on adding extra layers, like environmentally friendly grazing practices winning national recognition, and apprenticeship programs to train future ranch hands from a populace disinterested in farm jobs. Tens of thousands of schoolchildren visited for lessons in agriculture, animals and land use. 

The Phillipses had an open-gate policy for dedicated Front Range birders, who manned a banding station for migratory birds at the ranch headquarters ponds and lauded the spread on social media as one of Colorado’s best birding spots. 

Thousands more came for picnic concerts, featuring the likes of Steve Earle and Colter Wall. 

The land board loved it. Until it did not. 

Left: Beefmaster cattle raised by Ranchlands drink from a trough at the ranch in June 2022. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun) Right: A gaggle of Canada geese take refuge on a frozen pond at the ranch on Jan. 12. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“I applaud our current partners for being stellar land managers at the ranch for the past two decades,” said land board staff director Bill Ryan. Ryan offered the praise in 2021, at the same time the land board voted to break up the 2025 lease renewal into multiple parts and seek new bidders. 

The ranch had the only 25-year, all-around lease among the land board’s big properties, spokesperson Kristin Kemp said. The staff and board, after years of review, thought Chico Basin could still be preserved while generating more revenue if the next lease was for 10 years and split into separate bids for grazing, recreation and hospitality. 

The Phillipses bid on all three leases. For the agriculture lease, based on a proposed payment to the state for Animal Unit Months or the right to graze one cow for a month, the Phillipses say they matched local market rates and emphasized continuing their comprehensive, public-friendly stewardship. 

But the state’s flagship, legacy ranches are coveted by other family operations, and Chico Basin had been locked up for decades. One of the bidders for the grazing land was Flying Diamond, another family operation with tens of thousands of acres just to the east of the far end of Chico Basin, near Kit Carson. 

Flying Diamond’s Johnson family had bid on other big state land board ranches before and lost out. Set on expansion, Flying Diamond bid $35 an animal unit for Chico Basin, amounting to millions of dollars more than the Phillipses’ lease over the 10-year term. 

The Johnsons have been ranching around Kit Carson for 117 years, with the sixth generation now learning to ride and rope, Will Johnson said. Their home ranch has won some of the same conservation awards as Chico Basin, and the family wants to expand its commitment to environmentally friendly agriculture, Johnson said. 

“All I can say is we’re excited for it,” Johnson said, after “a very rigorous selection process. They have a lot of very large ranch holdings across the state, and have selected very interesting, progressive and neat operators on those. To have just joined that list is just an honor for us.” 

There’s an unspoken code among the big ranchers to not speak openly about the shortcomings of other ranchers, least of all to the media. But if the Phillips family was going to fight the land board decision, their appeal would have to buck that tradition with some very public objections to their competitors. 

In their written appeal filed in November, the Phillipses noted their bid was 25% higher than the land board’s standard grazing rate, even though it wasn’t as high as Flying Diamond’s. Though they didn’t mention Flying Diamond, only the “selected lessee.” 

“Any amount higher would lead to sacrificing land stewardship efforts because the land manager would be required to maximize revenues by focusing on production,” the appeal said. “This type of management generally results in overgrazing and damage to the land.” 

It’s not a personal criticism of another ranch family, Duke Phillips said, it’s pure agricultural economics. 

“If you have to produce income, you’re going to push things to the limit with the amount of money that they are paying,” he said. “We’ve been operating this ranch for 24 years, and we know what it does. And if the market’s good, they may squeak by, but the market is cyclical. We’re at a good spot now. But it’s going to go down.”

Who will preserve and teach for the long term?

The other issue at the heart of the Phillipses’ appeal was the looming demise of a teaching program that Ranchlands believes it owes to the communities surrounding their pastures. Lease bids were supposed to be evaluated on the board-set criteria of promoting “long term agricultural productivity and community stability,” from a Colorado constitutional provision on public lands. 

Seeking horseback riders in a world filled with electronic screens begins with the elementary school visits to Chico Basin, Duke Phillips said, and continues through an apprentice system that has trained at least 20 ranch managers. 

“We’re trying to build bridges with people in town,” Phillips said. Somewhere in those busloads of kids is a future steward who will thrive on putting down a cellphone and picking up a rope, they just don’t know it yet, the family believes. 

“Conservation is about people working together,” Phillips said. “People are sitting in front of computers — so few get outside any more.”

Left: James Baduini trims the edges on a leather strap in the Chico Basin Ranch leather shop in June 2022. (Mark Reis, Special to The Colorado Sun) Right: A pair of spurred cowboy boots are stored in the tack room at the ranch on Jan. 12. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Flying Diamond as the new leaseholder was not directly involved in the appeals process for the Phillips/Ranchlands bid. Will Johnson said Flying Diamond is not defensive about its bid, and is adamant that its market-rate payments per month of animal grazing put the rancher and the state in perfect alignment: Overgrazing the land would only hurt Flying Diamond, as the cattle would eventually suffer. 

Flying Diamond will continue honing its conservation and production practices to benefit the animals and the land, Johnson said. By way of example, Johnson mentioned that Flying Diamond has over the decades shifted calving to occur later in spring, when new prairie grass is thriving as feed. 

“Our simple thing is getting in sync with nature has been the neatest and most powerful decision we’ve made in the last 40 years,” Johnson said. “And that’s simplistic, but it’s a profound statement.”

In the end, only commissioner Josie Heath on the land board voted to entertain the Chico Basin Ranch appeal. 

Just before Christmas, on the last day the Phillips family could legally kick their appeal over into Colorado courts, Phillips’ daughter Tess Leach was grateful for the Heath vote but resigned to forgo new appeals and give up the ranch. 

 “We can’t compete financially with the land board,” Leach said. 

Nearly two decades at Sand Dunes also comes to an end

A hundred miles to the southwest, across the Sangre de Cristos and down into the San Luis Valley where bison graze against the ancient backdrop of 700-foot sand dunes, more shifts are coming. 

The Nature Conservancy for a quarter-century now has owned the far-flung Zapata Ranch, preserving it from development while running it as a traditional agricultural, wildlife and tourism cornucopia. The Phillipses have managed 2,000 head of bison for the conservancy for the past 18 years. They also operate the guest lodge, offering an array of experiences from dude ranch to gourmet cooking. 

Nature Conservancy staff has been reviewing land use at a number of its largest Colorado preserves, Fishbein said, comparing the status quo to the nonprofit’s long-stated goals of combining biological diversity, connecting people with nature and honoring historic and Indigenous culture. 

“Nature Conservancy has pretty lofty goals associated around that, and we want our preserves to really focus in and help us achieve those goals,” Fishbein said. 

After the Phillips lease runs out this year, Zapata will be reconfigured away from a hospitality ranch, and toward more inclusion of Indigenous culture and San Luis Valley traditions, Fishbein said. That may include running the bison herd with training programs for indigenous and Hispanic apprentices, as well as other new links to the community, she said. 

“We’re excited about reconnecting people to place, particularly because this is a very sacred place. For so many different peoples,” Fishbein said.

The nonprofit, she emphasized, is not giving up Ranchlands for another, similar operator.

The Phillipses “came in to manage this property at the right time. And I think it worked out for many, many years. They were terrific partners. So this is really about a shift in the Nature Conservancy’s focus, and we wish Ranchlands all the very best.”

Shoot the coyote, or find another solution? 

The Phillips family’s lessons to visitors have always included vivid examples of their stewardship philosophy. One principle is that challenges that nature throws their way — on a ranch the size of 65,000 football fields — are not a matter of combat, but adaptation. 

The backdrop of any conversation at Chico Basin Ranch is a view that stretches from Pikes Peak on the north to the Spanish Peaks on the south, with steady winds raking everything in between. The ranch exit from Interstate 25 is also the exit for Pikes Peak International Raceway, built in 1997 to host IndyCar races and 40,000 fans, and now most famous locally for a drive-through Christmas lights display. 

What the circumstances will allow you to make a living from is constantly changing.

“We talk about all the things that go into a cow becoming a good economic proposition for this environment,” Duke Phillips said. 

If a coyote attacks and maims a calf, Phillips said, it’s on Ranchlands to breed the next generation with better genetic instincts to avoid danger. 

“We don’t shoot the coyote,” he said. “We get rid of the cow.” 

Applying the same cool logic to Ranchlands’ own future is a different kind of challenge. A four-year renewal effort trying to prove their worth to the land board has ended in a heartache that for the moment is immune to steely-eyed analysis. 

The family won’t be in line when another treasured land board property opens up. 

“We’re leaving Colorado. Looking for something else.” Phillips said. 

“It’s been a big blow for us. And an unfair one.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.