FRANKTOWN —When Bob Shultz looks over Prairie Canyon Ranch from his house on the property, he’s still blown away by the beauty of it.
“It’s got a mile of Cherry Creek on it,” said Shultz, 88, who originally bought the property in 1980. “It’s got a super meadow on it, and you can’t find 100 acres of meadow any place between Colorado Springs and Denver — right here is it.”
Now the 978 acres that encompass the ranch belong to but Shultz still leases a house and some other buildings. Prairie Canyon Ranch is just one of several properties managed and owned by Douglas County Open Space, which turns 20 this year. It was one of the first large purchases by the county in 1996.
Shultz bought the acreage as a ranch for his calves. But it was a working ranch long before that. It remained so up until last year, when the family who had been living on it for 17 years moved because the grass was becoming over-grazed, said Jackie Sanderson, natural resources specialist with Douglas County Open Space.
That makes the property special: The pastures have had cattle almost continuously since Frederick Bartruff, a German immigrant, created a homestead in the early 1860s.
“We want to show that some of our open space properties can be used for the county’s economy, too,” Sanderson said. “We don’t want to buy up a lot of ranches and then put farmers and ranchers out of business. We want them to still be able to use some of the historical piece of land that we have for traditional uses.”
Sanderson said the county will open the property back up to ranching in a year or so.
“This is the most fantastic operating cattle ranch in this whole … valley,” Shultz said. “This needs to be grazed. You can’t just sit here on a park.”
That’s been part of the mission since acquiring the property.
Sanderson said the county has about $8 million in sales tax money to acquire new properties and manage what it has.
Mark Weston was part of the citizen-led effort to create the open space program in 1994 and sat on the open space advisory board when Prairie Canyon Ranch was acquired in 1996 and then opened in 2000.
“The opportunity to work with a willing landowner who is willing to convey his property into public ownership that contains live running water puts that property into a category that very few properties occupy,” Weston said.
The property also contains other notable features, including a cave, a pond, a plethora of wildlife — including elk, mule deer, pronghorn sheep, bobcats, raccoons, coyotes, big white pelicans and other birds — the restored original barn Bartruff built, restored original house, a restored outhouse built as part of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, a forge and the Happy Days Saloon, where Shultz likes to entertain guests from time to time.
But some of those buildings have needed significant work to restore them, carried out by people like Jerry Wlodarek, one of two historical restoration specialists with Douglas County Open Space, which maintains 38 structures.
“It’s neat because a lot of the old original stuff is still here,” Wlodarek said. “It’s got a lot of Colorado historical significance.”
Clayton Woullard: 303-954-2953, cwoullard@denverpost.com or twitter.com/yhClayton
Updated Dec. 12, 2014, at 3:54 p.m. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction. Originally, due to a reporter’s error, the name and title of historic restoration specialist Jerry Wlodarek were incorrect. Also, Douglas County owns 978 acres at Prairi Canyon Ranch. The original story had it wrong.
