Taylor Ranch - Billionaire's fence is the latest fault line

SAN LUIS — For more than 150 years, going back to when this high desert of sandy arroyos and snow-capped peaks was ceded by Mexico, they have gone to “the mountain” as part of their survival.

Like their ancestors who settled in the San Luis Valley before it was even Colorado, the descendants still gather firewood and graze their livestock on what they call “La Sierra” — more than 100 square miles of juniper and piñon pine forest rising to a 20-mile stretch of the saw-toothed Sangre de Cristo range. 

That was the deal made when the valley was subdivided in the mid-1800s. The settlers each got a plot of desert with access to an acequia irrigation ditch, and they were allowed to go into the high country to harvest timber, hunt deer and elk, and graze their cattle and sheep. 

The arrangement for the heirs of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1844 has remained mostly in place even as a line of wealthy men have purchased the land — not always peacefully, but with court battles, armed security guards, suspected arson and even a shooting

Now, the battle line between the current billionaire landowner, who is the son of a Texas oil baron, and the few thousand descendants with a legal right to use the land is a fence. 

A wire grid, 8 feet high and lined with barbed wire across the top and bottom. 

Some compare it to a prison yard.

The fence — which has become a symbol of wealth inequality, and a not-so-subtle reminder that the age-old, range-war struggles over land use and private property never die — is so tall that deer have been separated from their fawns. Locals say they watch deer and elk run alongside the wire searching for a place to cross. The fence’s wire squares get smaller as the fence nears the ground, narrowing to 3.5-inch openings that observers say are too small for a coyote or  even a wild turkey to squeeze through. 

The bulldozer that cut a 20-foot-wide gash to make way for the fence created not only an eyesore, locals complain, but diverted water that’s now carving deep canyons in the sand instead of spreading across the landscape. Irrigation ditches on ranches at the base of the mountains clog with sand whenever it rains as sediment pours down the foothills.

William Harrison, who purchased the land in 2017 after it was listed for $105 million, counters that trespassers have entered his private property to dump trash and collect antlers, to fish illegally and ride ATVs. It’s his right as a landowner to keep them out, he argues, especially since the descendants of the original settlers have keys to nine gates through which they can enter the property. He built the fence to prevent illegal trespassing by people with no access rights, and to contain his herd of bison, which locals estimate at about 60 animals. 

Costilla County commissioners, backed by scores of San Luis Valley residents who have turned county hearings into shouting matches, won a one-year moratorium on fence building in state district court. The temporary injunction runs out in September. 

Harrison, 37, was forced to stop before finishing the perimeter along his 88,000-acre property, which a previous owner named Cielo Vista Ranch, or view of heaven. Locals say they never see him in town and only speculate that he’s arrived when they see his helicopter. They estimate Harrison built about 20 miles of fence line before a judge ordered him to stop.

As both sides prepare for a trial this fall to decide the fate of the fence, tension is running high along the perimeter. 

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Kaitlynn Sartor