The recent $2.2 million purchase of the Grand View Ranch by the Colorado Division of Wildlife is expected to protect important wildlife habitat while providing additional hunting access and ensuring the future of a public shooting range in Grand County.
The 940-acre former ranch property becomes part of the larger Hot Sulphur Springs State Wildlife Area. It’s an important east-west migration corridor for deer and elk and provides significant habitat for greater sage grouse. It also provides hunting access to thousands of acres of public land.
The property had been designated for subdivision into multiacre lots but became available through a recent slowdown in high-end real estate. Purchase of the property also eliminates the potential conflicts with future residential development around the Byers Canyon shooting range, operated by the DOW. That free facility is popular among target shooters from Middle Park and as far away as Denver.
“While we always try to first protect land and maximize sportsmen’s dollars through the use of conservation easements, buying this parcel outright made sense when we considered the benefits to wildlife, the benefits to hunters and the benefits of the shooting range,” Lyle Sidener, area manager for the DOW, said in a news release.
The property opened to hunters in time for the current big-game seasons. Off-road vehicles, including snowmobiles, aren’t permitted within the property to protect wintering wildlife. Signs explaining those restrictions are in place.
Sangre de Cristo bighorn transplant.
With a little help from a helicopter, 13 Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep from Colorado’s southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains have been transplanted to the northern part of the range.
“Bighorn belong in the northern Sangres,” said Dan Prenzlow, southeast regional manager for the Colorado DOW. “Restoring native species is the kind of thing the Division of Wildlife loves to do.”
Colorado-based Quicksilver Air captured three rams, nine ewes and a lamb at elevations of 12,000 to 13,000 feet in the mountains southeast of Crestone. They were taken to an area north of Hunt Lake.
Once common in the northern Sangres, the sheep have dwindled there over the years. The last known sighting in the area was in 1980.
Karl Licis, Special to The Denver Post
