The Bluffs | Located 40 miles east of Denver, near Byers, this family ranch sidles up to a line of clay bluffs purported to have been used by plains Indian scouts looking for game and watching for enemies. About 1,200 folks live in the area that identifies itself as Byers, a corner of the district where there are about nine people per square mile.
The MacLennans have lived out here with the wind and stars for half a century, turning cattle out on the grass and corralling them, doctoring them and delivering them to market.
All the family did was ranch. But then the drought refused to relent, their expenses rose, and profits, meager even in good years, hovered for too long around the “break even” mark. Something had to give.
So four years ago they turned about 4,000 acres of their land north of Byers into a wildlife preserve. And then they started The Bluffs, a club for hunters willing to pay to stalk the native grasses and stands of cottonwoods for white-tailed deer, to orchestrate their dogs around the flushing of pheasant and Hungarian partridge, chukar, quail and turkey.
They opened a bed and breakfast near the hunting grounds. The extended family – grandparents, parents, kids, aunts, uncles, cousins – still runs some cattle, but they also raise commercial club lambs for livestock shows. They run a kennel and bird-dog training facility.
The MacLennans are doing what they must to stay put in their remote slice of Adams County, about as rural as you can get in the 7th Congressional District.
“Now, in a roundabout way, we do everything from helping your neighbor to hobnobbing with guests from Denver and New York,” says Dave MacLennan, 52, standing in the stuffed-
bird decorated “mud room” in the B&B, where guests relax after a day in the fields.
He misses the long days with cattle. “You spend 45 years punching cattle,” he says, and suddenly you’re forced to deal with customers. “I had to learn patience.”
MacLennan’s now 30-year-
old son Russell left the ranch for Colorado State University more than a decade ago but returned immediately after college.
Russell noses his Ford pickup to the edge of a bluff overlooking the preserve, backed with a stirring view of the Front Range. “You come out here,” he says, “and you know why I came back.”
– Douglas J. Brown
