After a quarter of a century, family’s tenure of running one of Colorado’s largest ranches comes to a close

As the last Beefmaster bull was loaded onto the 18-wheeler at Chico Basin Ranch, tears rolled down the wind-blistered red checks of Phillips family members as they closed not only a huge part of their heritage, but an era in Colorado ranching.

The frigid December day was the last day of 2024 and the end of two generations of the Phillips family tending to cattle on the 86,000 acres just southeast of Colorado Springs. For about a quarter of a century, Duke Phillips III and his family leased the spread from the State Land Board.

“I think we all feel like a part of ourselves has been severed and left alone,” Phillips said.

Life changed drastically for the Phillips family after the land board decided against renewing the family’s lease on the ranching, opting for a higher bid from the family that has owned the Flying Diamond Ranch in Kit Carson since 1907. The board also split the land into separate leases and shortened the term to 10 years.

The Phillipses sold two-thirds of their cattle, pulled up stakes and moved their headquarters to a smaller ranch in Wyoming. Phillips said prices and lack of access to land and housing are pushing people out of Colorado.

The Chico Basin Ranch is nestled between Colorado Springs and Pueblo, just east of Interstate 25. The ranch, one of the largest in the state, spans two counties – El Paso and Pueblo – with its vast and seemingly endless shortgrass prairie, lakes, springs, arroyos, creek bottoms and an abundance of birds and wildlife.

For the past 25 years, the Phillips family has managed and operated the ranch. Duke’s son Duke IV and daughter Tess Leach ran the day to day operations more recently.

Their company, Ranchlands, dedicated many years to fostering an array of events for the public. These included guest stays at the ranches, field days, pot lucks, free educational programs for K-12 students covering subjects such as science, math, and geography. They offered camps for students, including a bird observatory camp and a ranch camp. They worked with the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, allowing them to operate a banding station in association with Ranchlands’ Learning and Research Center. The conservancy said that Chico Basin Ranch is “a special place, an oasis of wetlands and wooded areas surrounded by otherwise very arid cholla grasslands.”

The annual Ranchlands Summer Concert Series held many concerts that acted as a fundraiser for the ranch’s education program. For over two decades they offered retreats for artists of all kinds — some with ranching experience, others with none — to spend time at either the Chico Basin Ranch or the Medano Zapata Ranch to experience and create art on the ranches. They offered ecotourism and hospitality, hunting and fishing and handcrafted leather goods made on the ranch.

“We helped build a connection between the land and people living in cities who are removed from it. We provided access to the land to urban communities for them to learn about it, care for it and learn what is needed to make nature vibrant and also understand the need to protect it. Land connects us together as humans, as a community and as an American culture,” Duke III said.

Duke IV said, “We see ourselves not as masters of nature but part of it. Our traditions hold land stewardship at their core.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second blow to the family’s ranching business was the loss of work managing cattle and bison on the 100,000-acre Zapata Ranch on the eastern edge of the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. Ranchlands said The Nature Conservancy, which owns the ranch in southwest Colorado, wants to involve indigenous people in managing the land and bison herd.

“Losing the two ranches means losing the home where we have lived for the last quarter century,’ Duke III said. “It’s where I raised my kids, and where my five grandchildren were born. It’s where my kids were raising their own kids. We will miss the people we are leaving behind in the community, our business network and all the school kids who have been coming to the ranch for years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“But most of all, it’s the place – the land and the animals – that we will miss. The lakes, the endless prairie, the creek and its springs and the little things like owls dropping out of their perches in the creek bank and flying low in front of us as we are riding down the watercourse. We will miss the summer thunderheads, rising like massive anvils in the huge sky, that bring the monsoonal rains, giving life to this place of unbelievable beauty and resilience.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Helen H. Richardson has been a photographer at The Denver Post for 32 years. Although the Chico Basin will remain a working ranch at least for the next decade, the departure of a ranching family from the land and state struck an emotional chord with Richardson. She spent a year photographing the Phillips family’s final days on the ranch.