Notes from Crowley Ranch Reserve

So you should view this fleeting world --
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

--Diamond Sutra

Crowley Ranch Reserve is two thousand acres of former ranch land managed as much for the wildlife as the dwellings clustered along the roads. The Reserve lies just north of the Colorado border, between the continental divide and desolate mesas to the west. The Navajo River defines its northern border as it flows down from the South San Juan Wilderness and some of the most remote and wild terrain in Colorado. 

The last grizzly bear in the state was killed on a large ranch east of the Reserve near the Navajo headwaters. Some people believe they still live there along with black bears, mountain lions, elk, mule deer and wild turkeys.

At 7,800 feet, Crowley Ranch Reserve sits at the intersection of altiplano grasslands and alpine tundra. The soil is rocky and acidic but hardy Wheatgrasses, Grama, and Brome survive in this increasingly drought-prone area along with Sages and Junipers. Drifts of Gambel’s Oak and the occasional Ponderosa Pine offer patches of shade that mule deer find conducive to summer afternoon naps. 

Much of the rock on the Reserve is Mancos Shale, the flat silty sea bottom deposited 75 to 95 million years ago during the Cretaceous period when the area was under the North American Inland Sea. Polished red, green, and black volcanic rocks lie on the ground in arrangements both random and perfect. Shark teeth, snail shells and fossilized Ammonites are further evidence of the area’s submerged past.

In the spring, the hillsides turn yellow with Woolly Mules’ Ears. Swaths of purple Rocky Mountain Iris blanket lower and wetter areas. In other parts of the Reserve, Prairie Coneflowers make an appearance, along with Penstemon, Prairie Smoke, and the occasional Tufted Evening Primrose. My nominee for best in show is the Sego Lily. It is the embodiment of elegance, balance and symmetry with its three delicately pointed white petals, a yellow center with rusty accents, and stamens of bright gold. 

The monsoons of summer bring thunderstorms that sweep across the old growth Aspen forests on the craggy slopes of V Rock and Navajo Peak. In the late afternoon, they are often accented with rainbows and dramatic lighting.

In the winter, the distant snow-covered peaks of the Weminuche seem to draw closer. Pagosa Peak, Cimarrona, and Rio Grande Pyramid hold their snow into late June, reflecting pinkish early morning sun when their surroundings are still shrouded in darkness.

West of the Reserve, flat-topped Vigil, Abeyta, Cortado, and Archuleta Mesas provide aerial perspective for classic big-sky western sunsets. Stories add their own color to the mesas. People talk about surgically precise cattle mutilations ascribed to aliens or perhaps government agents looking for evidence of radiation poisoning as a result of buried waste from the Manhattan Project. The stories and the rolling grasslands between the mesas dotted with a few desultory cattle evoke a sense of isolation and timelessness.

The small landholdings along the edges of billionaire cattle ranches and empty reservation lands are adorned with defunct pickup trucks, long-deceased farm machinery, and rusting metal with no discernible former function. Like the bleached bones of deer marking the place of their final breath, those skeletons speak of impermanence. Decrepit trailers swaddled by the wabi sabi of generations of junk, million-dollar views, and barbed wire fences tracing lines to distant vanishing points hide their forgotten inhabitants. 

The sheepherders that drove hundreds of sheep north from Espanola, Canjilon, Tierra Amarilla, and Tres Piedras to summer around V Rock are forgotten as well. Their arborglyphs—carved names, images, and dates in the bark of Aspens—are dying along with the trees that bore their scars for over a hundred years. The railroad that transported sheep along the Navajo River on its way to Chama was dismantled long ago. 

In the latter half of the 19th century, Texan PC ‘Pet’ Crowley drove his herd of cattle to what is now Crowley Ranch Reserve when Colorado was scarred with raucous mining camps of avaricious fortune seekers.  In 1893, the government sharply reduced its silver purchases, mines closed, and the hordes moved on. 

Pet Crowley’s name remained on 30,000 acres of land. The cattle moved in as the Navajo, Apache and Ute hunters were moved out. Land that was the province of hunter-gatherers for thousands of years became parceled and fenced. 

When Pet Crowley died, his holdings were divided among six children and Crowley Ranch Reserve was created from half of one of those shares in 1987. Oil wells sunk by Pet’s descendants in the 1930’s never panned out but one brought up geothermal water that still flows into two hot springs pools, a gift more precious than oil on a cold winter night.

Before the Crowleys put their names on titles, the Reserve was part of the 600,000-acre Tierra Amarilla Land Grant. King Ferdinand VII of Spain, ‘El Deseado’ (‘The Desired’), arrogated to himself the right to gift land he had never seen and of which he knew little. A third of the grant later fell into the hands of Santa Fe lawyer Thomas Catron via the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, chicanery, inheritance, money, and politics. Pet Crowley stepped into the picture over the claims of Hispanic settlers who themselves claimed land long occupied by tribes who had in turn driven out earlier tribes. 

Human lives are bubbles on a stream compared with the tectonic migrations of continents, mountain building and erosion, earthquakes and volcanoes, and encroaching and receding seas that mark geologic time. When the Mancos Shale of the Reserve was laid down, the dinosaurs had not yet had their fateful rendezvous with the dark cosmic messenger Chicxulub. The course of that asteroid intersected that of the earth, ushering in a post-apocalyptic world that drove the dinosaurs and three-quarters of other species extinct. 

If we were to hover above the Reserve and travel deeper into time, we would see ancient seas flood the area and recede many times, rivers meander through for millions of years before drying up, sand dunes pile up and blow away, mountains rise and fall. 

The seas and the dunes and the rivers defined the land for more than a billion and a half years before the Ancestral Rockies rose 300 million years ago only to be eroded away long before today’s San Juan Mountains began to rise 70 million years ago. 

Pangea and Rodinia, the ancient continents that once held this land and the deeply-buried Vishnu Schist underneath evoke a mythological past buried deep in time and the earth. Like everywhere else in this evolving universe, the story of the land under Crowley Ranch Reserve is one of evolution and change. Our human lives, our creations and our degradations are as fleeting as the thunderstorms that bring summer afternoon rains.

                                                                                          -Ron Schell, Crowley resident