Donna Phelps loves a good chat, so when the retired schoolteacher answers the phone one morning at the Gunnison County, Colo., ranch where her husband Duane has been raising cattle since 1958, she is happy to find a former student on the line. But the caller isn't interested in idle talk. Like so many people in the area--a remote sage-and-wildflower valley--the student is in real estate now. She tells Donna that a client from Texas wants to spend $105,000 on a 35-acre "ranchette" of undeveloped land. Would the Phelpses be interested in selling part of their 508-acre spread?
They could use the money. Their ranch has been profitable in only two of the past 10 years, and Donna, a vivacious 61-year-old, is sick of scraping by. She wants to enjoy retirement with Duane, a soulful, laconic man of 67 who in the past two years has survived four operations and two broken limbs. But Duane is stubborn. His family has been ranching here for more than a century. "I know how I want to die," he says. "Just fall over in my field. That's the best way." Yet he also knows that when his time comes, the couple's three grown children--ranchers who work outside jobs to make ends meet-- could be forced to sell the ranch just to pay the federal estate tax. "We need income," says Donna. Yet she tells the agent she is not selling. "I'd say yes," she admits later, "but the family would outvote me 4 to 1."
The Phelpses are trying to hang on, but many of the 75 other families still ranching in the county are just waiting for the right deal. In the lush valley bottomland along the Gunnison, Slate and East rivers, FOR SALE signs are almost as common as cottonwoods. Countywide, 13,000 acres of ranchland have been sold for development in the past two years; of the 75,000 prime acres that remain, 17,500 are for sale. Development's pace is fastest at the northern head of the valley, where the funky ski town of Crested Butte is a money magnet. Opulent homes necklace its ridges, and a million visitors pass through each year. Though still rural, the county has a choice: either it finds a way to shape the sprawl, channeling development into existing growth areas and preserving open space, or it loses its high-lonesome charm and becomes, like so many Colorado valleys, overbuilt, overcrowded and irrevocably scarred.
Gunnison still has a chance, thanks to an unlikely coalition of conservative ranchers and left-leaning environmentalists who have put aside their cultural differences and teamed up to launch a grass-roots campaign to save ranches from the bulldozers. The Gunnison Legacy Project, as the effort is known, is the brainchild of Susan Lohr, a soft-spoken ornithologist from California, and Bill Trampe, a lean, crusty rancher whose family has been in the valley for three generations. The bird watcher and the cowboy, as Lohr and Trampe are sometimes called, hope to save 3,000 acres of ranchland in the next year--including half of Duane and Donna Phelps' place--and as many as 20,000 more acres by the year 2002.