Nearly a decade ago, Susan Nottingham decided it was time to leave. Her family, which traces their Colorado ranching roots back to a homestead in what is now Avon and Beaver Creek, put her parents’ nearly 20,000-acre ranch above the Colorado River in Bond on the market for a cool $100 million.
“The process of selling it was pretty painful, listening to people talk about basically butchering it and carving it up piece by piece and selling the water. They just had no love for the land,” the 73-year-old Nottingham said.
“We’ve been in Eagle County since 1880. We were in Avon and until all the development pushed us out in 1982 and we moved up here.”
Last month Great Outdoors Colorado, through its land acquisition program and regional partnership with Eagle County and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, announced it is awarding $10 million to the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust to place the Nottingham Ranch under a conservation easement that will protect the cattle ranch — and its water — from any future development.
The Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust was created in 1995 “to help multi-generational families keep their properties intact,” the trust’s director Erik Glenn said.
“Susan Nottingham is a perfect example of that. She is an every-day-on-the-ground producer who has done incredible things for high-altitude cattle production and she wants to keep that property intact,” Glenn said. “This property contains some of the most unique landscapes, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat in the state. If you were putting together a list of what makes a great conservation easement, Nottingham Ranch is the poster child.”
The trust holds about 500 easements across the state.
Nottingham’s brothers, Randy and Steve, died in an avalanche on Vail Pass in 1987. Her father, Bill, was among the first ranchers in the Eagle River Valley, with a property that reached from Dowd Junction to west of Avon. He worked on Nottingham Ranch every day up to his death in 2014. Her mom, Neva, passed away in February 2024.
“There are no heirs left. I’m all alone up here,” said Nottingham, who continues to run about 1,200 head of cattle on meadows that produce 3,000 tons of hay a year. The conservation easement includes some of the most senior Colorado River water rights, allowing the ranch to divert as much as 163 cubic feet per second from the river. Nottingham made waves in 2017 when she announced plans to sell her family’s property. At the same time, a billionaire Texas oil baron purchased the 83,000-acre Cielo Vista ranch in the San Luis Valley, which was listed for $105 million. And the state was starting to ponder a path toward purchasing the Crazy French Ranch outside Trinidad, which in 2019 became Fishers Peak State Park.
Those ripples reached the broader conservation community in Colorado, which responded by creating better ways for large ranch owners to conserve massive swaths of their property. The Nottingham Ranch listing was one of several sparks that moved land trusts like Colorado Cattlemen’s, The Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, Colorado Open Lands and The Conservation Fund to work with GOCO to create the Centennial Program, which invests in “once-in-a-generation visions and projects.”
“Her listing that property made everyone kind of sad, but it spurred everyone into action to create tools to give landowners like her an alternative option,” Glenn said.
The irony is that the Nottinghams were lifelong critics of conservation easements. They did not like using public money to encumber historic properties with rules that prevented certain types of projects.
“Conservation easements are bad words in my book. I’m not fond of them because … they give government a toehold to private property. And private property rights are such a blessing and such a wonderful gift and to give them away just makes me sick,” Nottingham told a reporter in 2017 during a ranch tour.
She’s shifted her mindset after meeting the livestock producers who shepherd the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust.
“They are old-time ranchers who know what they are doing and know what ranching is. They are easier to work with than a land trust that is interested only in conservation,” she said in an interview with The Sun last month.
Glenn said he is used to working with wary ranchers.
“We’ve had lots of discussions with landowners who were anti-easement or at least skeptical of easements, but they ultimately decided to move in that direction,” Glenn said. “It’s really about time and getting people comfortable because it’s a big decision.”
Nottingham said part of her decision involved supporting the agricultural legacy of smaller ranchers and landowners around her property. If she sold to a developer, the pressure on her neighbors to do the same would grow, she said.
“If I sold they would have to leave the land, so I’m trying to think of them as well,” said Nottingham, who plans to remain at her family’s ranch for the rest of her life.
But mostly, she’s thinking about her mom and dad.
“This is a pretty magnificent place. Everyone who comes here says it’s one of the prettiest places on Earth,” she said. “I’m hoping this would be honoring my mom and dad’s 64 years of hard work here. Their whole marriage was just work, work, work. And I want to protect their legacy.”