The people of San Luis, whose ancestors grew crops in the valley and grazed their sheep and cattle in the high country, call him the “occupier” and the “billionaire.”
Now, William Harrison, the wealthy oil heir who owns the 77,000-acre Cielo Vista Ranch, land upon which thousands of land-grant heirs have rights to harvest timber and run livestock, wants to build a new home.
The 7,000-square-foot house, with seven outbuildings including a helicopter pad and a “toy box” for snowmobiles and ATVs, isn’t the issue, exactly. It’s that Harrison wants a 233-acre “buffer zone” around his house that land-grant access holders say would cut them off from more than 3,000 acres of forest, lush meadows and canyons where cattle graze.
A three-day court hearing in Costilla County this week wrapped up with closing arguments Thursday and is now in the hands of a special master appointed to sort out disputes between Harrison and the heirs of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1844. The main legal question is whether it’s “reasonable” for Harrison to restrict the heirs’ enjoyment of the land by prohibiting them from passing through the buffer zone. The case’s special master, David Tenner, said he would issue a decision in the coming weeks after reading additional briefs he requested from both sides.
Harrison, who is bad-mouthed by locals for not mingling with the people of Costilla County and for spending time on his ranch only once or twice per year, was not in the courtroom. Instead, he was represented by his attorney, Jamie Dickinson, and his ranch manager, Carlos DeLeon.
“Mr. Harrison is constantly criticized,” Dickinson said. “They don’t even use his name. It is a dehumanizing process. At the end of the day, we are here because Mr. Harrison wants to build a home here, in Costilla County, in San Luis.”
DeLeon testified that Harrison picked the spot for his new home because of its beautiful views of the valley and the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He said he has not seen anyone collecting firewood near that area, and that it was too high for cattle.
“It’s pretty barren up there,” he added.
In recent years, the ranch has struggled with trespassers — people poaching elk and taking their heads, hunting the forest for shed antlers, and joy-riding on ATVs, DeLeon said. That’s why the ranch has 30-50 cameras, he said.
The trespassers, though, are different from the 1,010 out of about 5,000 land-grant heirs who submitted the required paperwork to receive keys to various gates on roads into the ranch.
Two sheep ranchers who have grazed their animals on the land the access holders call “La Sierra” said a restricted buffer zone would make it nearly impossible to take sheep to some of the best grazing meadows on the mountain. Thick forest and rugged canyons would block their way if they tried other routes, they said.
Richard Kuhn, a farmer and rancher in the San Luis Valley, is the great-great-great grandson of people who first settled the area, before Colorado was even a state. He has 900 sheep, and last summer, he and his border collie, Ruby, moved his sheep from his ranch that borders Cielo Vista into a meadow above Harrison’s proposed home site.
The journey takes about two days, because Kuhn lets the sheep move at their own pace.
“I don’t push them too hard,” he explained. “I don’t like to stress them out.” Along the way, he noticed signs of elk and deer, and saw cattle grazing, he said.
His journey in July was captured in photos on the ranch’s cameras, and the time-stamped photos were entered as evidence in court. Kuhn brought his camper up the road that leads to the homesite, then set up camp in a gravel pit and near a creek. Each day, he would bring the sheep to higher ground, letting them get used to the area, then bring them back to camp at night. The meadow above the treeline was lush, with grass up to his knees, he recalled.
“We have to be with the sheep all the time,” Kuhn testified. “It’s just part of sheepherding. They try to veer off. We could lose them. It’s not like cattle where you could leave them and they just take care of themselves. There are a lot of predators. They can just find a way to die. They taste good and they die easy.”
After a few days, Kuhn brought his sheep to the meadow overnight, far enough from the homesite that he couldn’t see it, he said.
Without access to the road, however, Kuhn said bringing his sheep to the upper meadow would be next to impossible. And that was a sticking point in the case.
Harrison had the road put in because he is building a house. The road also improved access to the area for land-grant heirs. Years ago, there was an old sheep trail that ranchers used to move livestock to the area, but that has been destroyed by logging roads and lack of upkeep, ranchers testified.
Another point of contention is whether grazing domestic sheep could bring disease, including pneumonia, to bighorn sheep that live on the ridges above the homesite — and whether that is something the special master should even consider when deciding on the rights of access holders.
Kuhn said he hadn’t even seen bighorn sheep on La Sierra since he was a kid.
“When you make a decision,” he told the special master, “I think it’s going to affect not just this generation but several generations down the road. If my grandchildren want to take sheep up there, it should be their right.”
One of the attorneys for the access holders, Elena Musz, said the rights of the land-grant heirs are not limited in time or location.
“The plaintiffs do not just hold these rights today or next week,” she said. “For generations to come, as long as the mountains stand, however the landscape may change, the plaintiffs’ rights to harvest firewood, timber and graze their livestock on all of La Sierra stand, too.
“This is not really a dispute about 233 acres. In truth, this is a dispute about 3,353 acres. That high country is prime grazing area especially in times of drought. When winters are dry, summers in the low country are drier still.”
Attorneys for the land-grant heirs also noted, more than once, that the buffer zone Harrison is requesting around his ranch is bigger than the restricted areas around the White House and the Vatican, combined.
The hearing is the latest in one of Colorado’s longest-running land disputes, Lobato v. Taylor, a lawsuit filed in 1981 against a former owner of the Cielo Vista Ranch, Jack Taylor, who was accused of closing off access to the land-grant heirs.
It’s separate, though related, to litigation over an 8-foot-tall fence that Harrison began constructing in 2020 around Cielo Vista Ranch, which is 130 square miles containing 18 mountains higher than 13,000 feet and the 14,053-foot Culebra Peak.