Sheep are the winners in a San Luis Valley land battle that pitted grazing livestock against a billionaire landowner’s new mansion.
In a new court ruling, the ancestors of a land grant dating back to before Colorado was a state won the right to keep grazing sheep and cattle on the land they call La Sierra. The ruling, however, ends their right to collect firewood in a 233-acre buffer zone around landowner William Harrison’s new 7,000-square-foot house on the Cielo Vista Ranch.
The ruling comes after a three-day February hearing in Costilla County in which Harrison’s attorneys argued for the buffer zone to prevent land grant heirs from coming near his home on the 77,000-acre ranch. Harrison owns the land but shares rights with hundreds of land grantees, heirs to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1844.
The split ruling, from the case’s special master, David Tenner, comes about three months after the hearing.
He said there was no evidence that land grantees have been using the buffer zone area to collect firewood or harvest timber, and that there are other areas of La Sierra where they can continue to collect enough wood.
But Tenner called the livestock grazing issue “much more difficult.”
Sheep owners Alonzo Lobato and Richard Kunk testified that they have brought their sheep to graze in that area near the landowner’s new house and that they would need to traverse through the proposed buffer zone to reach a prime grazing area called Perdido Canyon.
Tenner said he found it unlikely that cattle would graze in the high-elevation land beyond the buffer zone, but he noted that cattle wander and do not need supervision of humans as they graze in the mountains. Sheep, however, need “frequent attention” from their handlers, so humans would need access to the area around and beyond the new homesite in order to tend to their sheep.
The sheep owners who testified during the hearing said the only way to access Perdido Canyon is by way of a road to the new homesite built for Harrison about five years ago. The road improved access to the area for land-grant heirs. Old sheep trails that shepherds used decades ago became overgrown and impassable in the decades that land grantees have fought for access to La Sierra.
The proposed buffer zone “would cut-off reasonable access to the Perdido Canyon for grazing sheep,” the special master wrote, and any alternative route to the canyon is “too dangerous and would be an unreasonable restriction on the access rights” of land grantees.
Regarding the road, Tenner tried to strike a compromise in his ruling. He said Harrison should not only allow land grantees access to his road, but that he should extend the road, or at least some sort of steep and winding path, so it reaches all the way to the Perdido Canyon area. The road extension could go east of the homesite, meaning that livestock owners could stick to the road instead of walking through the homesite, which includes seven outbuildings and a helicopter pad.
Under the new plan, the size of the buffer zone around the home would change. Attorneys for the land-grant heirs mentioned multiple times that the buffer zone Harrison requested around his new home was bigger than the restricted areas around the White House and the Vatican, combined.
“The buffer zone must be modified to permit access to the new road,” Tenner wrote in his 13-page decision. “However, the new road ends at the homesite. If Mr. Harrison wants the privacy and security of a buffer zone around the homesite, an additional access road must be constructed to connect access rights holders from the end of the new road … to Perdido Canyon.”
The ruling 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 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 the ranch, which is 130 square miles containing 18 mountains higher than 13,000 feet and the 14,053-foot Culebra Peak.
Harrison’s ranch manager testified that Harrison chose the spot for his new home because of its beautiful views of the valley and the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The ranch has struggled with trespassers — people poaching elk and taking their heads, hunting the forest for shed antlers, and joy-riding on ATVs, 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.