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Ranchers, who value hard work and fortitude above all else, take the measure of their neighbors slowly, winter by winter. Trampe didn't fully accept Lohr until she joined him on the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy Board, which is fighting a decade-long court battle to prevent the Denver suburbs from taking Gunnison's water. It wasn't Lohr's eloquence on the subject that broke Trampe's reserve. It was the way Lohr got to the water-board meetings. Since the only road to Lohr's cabin in Gothic was closed from October to June, she had to ski out, an hour's trek to Mount Crested Butte, where she would jump into a Subaru wagon and drive an additional 45 minutes to Gunnison. After the meeting, she would snowshoe home in the dark. "Anybody who lives all winter in Gothic," says Trampe, "is either crazy or all right with me."
Stand in the field beside Trampe's house on a Sunday afternoon in April, and you'll see what's killing ranching. The sport utilities full of skiers fly past on the two-lane country road that leads from Crested Butte to Gunnison. From time to time, a car pulls over and people emerge to drink in the scene--the West Elk Wilderness rising white and jagged above a graceful slope known as Antelope Ridge. It's an astounding vista, and naturally some visitors decide to buy a piece of it, at $3,000 to $10,000 an acre.
But Trampe, one of three cash-poor ranchers who own most of the open land between Gunnison and Crested Butte, was not among those selling. "This is home," he says. In the field beside the brick house his father built sits a huge pile of stones, polished smooth by 100 winters, bleached white by 100 years of high-country sun. It was created by Trampe's grandfather, clearing this land for farming and cattle. When Trampe took over the ranch after his father's death 30 years ago, little had changed in the valley. As late as 1990, Trampe could use the road to Crested Butte to drive his herd home from the high pastures. Along the way, the cows rested in midvalley meadows he calls "crucial stepping-stones up the valley floor." The stepping-stones are gone now. In the early 1990s, half a dozen ranches in the midvalley were sold off and subdivided. Standing in his field, Trampe points north, where the land climbs toward Crested Butte, and concatenates the old names: "Mountain Lair. Delmont. Danni. Roaring Judy. Now they're all vacation properties."
So he and Lohr hatched their plan, mapping the valley from Gunnison to Crested Butte and pinpointing what was most at risk. Studying conservation easements, they hit on the idea of paying ranchers for development rights. "We said, 'These preservation tools are great, but we've got to find funding,'" Lohr recalls. "We had a million ideas and no money."
Then, in late 1995, GOCO began identifying Legacy Projects that would preserve land and wildlife. Trampe and Lohr spent 1996 traveling the county, sitting in kitchens drinking coffee and talking about their plan. "This project had to start with ranchers," says Trampe. "Cattlemen don't take kindly to people telling them what to do." Eventually, 25 ranchers wanted in.