One breezy afternoon in mid-July, Mike Potter’s phone started making all kinds of noise.
“It goes, beep, beep, beep, beep!” shouted the Ridgway rancher, brandishing his flip phone from the pocket of his mud-stained jeans. “And boy,” he added, “I started doing this,” fingers massaging his temples and running through his hair.
Two weeks prior, Potter watched from his yard as fire raced toward the Cimarrons in the early days of the Gold Mountain Fire. This time, the racket was an alert for the first evacuation order from the Elk Fire outside Lake City, which sparked near the top of an 11,000 footplus high ridge above the creek of the same name.
And just around the bend from the ridge, Potter had four dozen cows grazing in the high country, two and a half hours from his ranch just south of Ridgway. Leaving a note for his brother Henry – which concluded with, “This is not funny” – Potter, as he put it, “got my ass in gear.”
Though Potter’s cows made it out, his dash over to Hinsdale County was just the latest trial in what’s been one of the roughest years he’s had in nearly six decades of ranching. And other ranchers on the Western Slope echoed the sentiment that extreme drought, rampant wildfires, a dearth of good rangeland, and elevated hay prices are straining them to their limits.
Several agreed that even the infamous drought of 2002, when Colorado saw its weakest snowpack in over a quarter century, never felt quite this bad.
“This is worse,” said Potter, who’s worked his nearly 300-acre spread since 1967.
Janie VanWinkle, an advocate for the agricultural industry who with her family runs VanWinkle Ranch outside of Grand Junction, answered in identical terms.
Or as Garrett Hall, who works for the Ingo family on Ridgway’s Fisher Ranch, put it, “We’re pinched on every front.”
Tough water year leads to challenging summer
Well before Gold Mountain went up in smoke at the end of June, the squeeze was already on for ranchers after a warm winter with dismal snowfall.
“It started off bad with the snowpack because their irrigation water is real slim. Some places are out of water or have been out of water,” said Ken Miller, president of the Ouray County Cattleman’s Association.
Potter said that earlier this year, the water shortage he expected to come prompted him to replace his old rotted-out weir – an analog device that measures water flow – on the Charley Logan Ditch just west of Cedar Hill Cemetery to ensure he was receiving his allotments.
In Mesa County, the VanWinkles started the year behind the count after about 60% of their grazing allotment from the U.S. Forest Service burned in last summer’s Turner Gulch Fire, near Unaweep Canyon northeast of Gateway. Heading into the summer, the family was forced to divide their cattle between Grand Mesa, Piñon Mesa and northwest Colorado. The spread of the herd makes for brutally long days, VanWinkle added, with her son Dean routinely out for 16 to 18 hours.
And the family’s search for pasture, she said, creates a domino effect for other ranchers.
“In order to put cattle on Grand Mesa … we had to give somebody else the boot, so to speak,” she added. “That created another problem for another family because we needed that for our own cattle.”
Potter said he ran into the same problem after land he’d leased in years past was needed by its owners. Out of options in Colorado, Potter said he was forced to ship 26 cows out to eastern Oklahoma at a cost of just over $5,000 – and that was after a trucker friend, Tim Gray, gave him a discount on the freight.
The only upside was that this spring, according to Fisher Ranch’s Andrea Ingo, was “a breeze,” albeit a foreboding one.
“We didn’t have the cold stress. We didn’t have a lot of sickness. We didn’t have mud. So it was like, things are going a little too easy,” Ingo said.
The light work, of course, didn’t last. For the Ingos, the chief problems have been the related issues of water and feed shortages. Both grass in the high country and hay on their ranch have come in short, and some of the growers who supply the family with cornstalks decided to skip planting entirely this year.
As stock ponds have dried up, meanwhile, more and more of the family’s time is eaten up by ferrying water to their herds on Log Hill Mesa and elsewhere in 1,500-gallon tanks – something the ranch has only done before on an “extremely limited basis,” Ingo said.
“It’s a real time drain, [with] everything you’re stretched on – still trying to irrigate, still trying to get fences done,” she added.
‘Pretty grim’
Miller, of the cattleman’s association, said the Gold Mountain and Elk fires have only made matters worse. While Potter was ferrying his cows back from Lake City with the help of other local ranch hands from the Wolf and Double RL ranches, operations east of Ridgway saw swaths of pasture scorched beyond use, while hay prices have approached $300 per ton.
This time last year, the same amount of hay went for about $170 per ton on the Western Slope, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The J Bar M Ranch and Sleeping Indian Ranch, both of which were within evacuation zones, continued to work as the fire ran through Nate and Cow creeks, the Ouray County Sheriff’s Office said.
“It’s pretty grim,” Miller summarized. With beef prices remaining high, several local ranchers said they’ll likely be forced to sell off a larger share of their herd this fall than they’d usually care to.“ I think they’ll have to,” Miller said. “The corporation-type ranches – you know, the big ones – they can afford it. But the family-run ranches, which, there’s a few of them still around, it’ll be tough on them.”
“It might be a reality to have to sell down,” Ingo said.
“I think ranching is kind of more of a long game – you’re in it for the long haul. The health of the land and your pastures is extremely important,” she said. “So you have to react to these kinds of years that are tough, but know that you’re trying to get through a rocky spot and not throw in the towel.”
Surviving this summer’s economic and environmental pressures will be challenge enough for local ranchers, but could also fuel the ongoing decline of the cattle industry across the Western Slope.
In January, a study out of Colorado Mesa University showed a marked decline over recent years in the area’s ranching business. Surveying Rio Blanco, Garfield, Mesa, Delta and Montrose counties, the report found a roughly 35% decrease in cattle inventory and sales between 2017 and 2022.
VanWinkle, a member of a Grand Junction-based nonprofit which commissioned the report, predicted that the area would see another decrease of the same size by 2027.
Economics professor Nathan Perry, the study’s author, attributed the sharp decline to persistent drought conditions, rising costs of doing business, and a generational dropoff in agriculture. Across the five-county area, only about 7% of farmers and ranchers are under the age of 35, with nearly 40% doubtful their operations will survive into the next generation.
VanWinkle said she’s fortunate that her son moved back home to help run their ranch and ensure it has a future, but knows many of her peers can’t count on that same security.
“Agriculture has always been here through the booms and the busts. Ag has always been the steady hand, and that’s not happening right now,” she said. “Drought is the first reason, and the age of producers is the second reason. You combine the two, and we’ve got the perfect storm.”
With beef prices still at historic highs, VanWinkle added, this could be the year that finally sees some older ranchers throw up their hands and walk away.
“If I’m a normal person – and I’m 65, but I don’t know if I’m a normal person,” she said, “[with] these kinds of prices, we would say, ‘We’ve had a good run.
Let’s get out while the getting’s good and move on.’” “In Dr. Perry’s study,” she added, “he talks about, you know, the intangibles of agriculture, these open spaces, the ranches, seeing cattle out on the landscape – that’s part of what makes Colorado, Colorado. As we lose these family businesses in our community, it’s going to have a huge impact.”
Chart Riggall is a journalist with Report for America, a nonprofit program that helps boost reporting resources in underserved areas. He’s also part of the Western Environmental Reporting Collaborative, a partnership between Report for America, High Country News and local news organizations across the West.
