BURNS — As rain clouds cast a chromatic hue across her lush pastures, rolling as far as the eye can see, Susan Nottingham shrugs her shoulders and sighs.
“Absolutely gut-wrenching. So anguishing. Just a very, very difficult decision,” she says, kicking the dirt with a well-worn boot.
It was before dawn on a cold spring morning in May when Nottingham, freshly 65, called her childhood friend Ed Swinford, a former schoolteacher turned real estate broker.
“She said, ‘It’s time.’ I could tell the emotion in her voice and what she was feeling just to get those words to come out,” says Swinford, his hand resting on his friend’s shoulder.
“I’m just not finding a lot of purpose here anymore,” Nottingham says. “There’s just no more reason for me to keep this going.”
Ranching is in Nottingham’s blood. The Nottingham clan homesteaded the Vail Valley, shepherding sheep along the banks of the Eagle River long before the pastures would sprout resort mega-mansions in Beaver Creek and superstores in Avon.
Now, itap time for the last of her brood to cede their ranching roots. . The green meadows — stippled with 1,200 head of cattle and another 1,000 yearlings bound for market — rolling from the dark timber of the Flat Tops Wilderness Area’s basalt-columned Dome Peak. The cliff-pocked terrain along Cabin Creek and the Colorado River. The sagebrush high desert, the deep canyons. Elk, bears, wildcats. Homes, barns, corrals, tractors, trucks and trailers. Enough water to slake a city.
The price: $100 million.
Before you start conjuring Mike Meyers, ring-festooned pinkie at the corner of his mouth, realize Nottingham is no Dr. Evil. Far from it. She is asking $5,000 an acre in one of the nation’s priciest regions. But still, such a staggering sum.
“I do look at that number and I think ‘Oh, my gosh. How did I end up here?’ My dad made some smart decisions. He was an incredible business mind,” she says. “The price is reflective of how hard my dad worked.”
A little more than three years ago, William Emmet Nottingham Jr. was tinkering in one of the ranch’s many shops when he laid down to take a nap. He never woke. He was 86 and a legend of the Vail Valley.
In 2004, he told The Denver Post, in a story about many times over: “We are used to working and we are used to ranching. We aren’t going to retire. We are going to work until we die.”
Which is exactly what he did.
Susan labored the land alongside her dad all her life. She says their souls were connected. It hasn’t been the same without him.
“I enjoy every day. Almost,” Nottingham says of workdays that always begin well before sunrise and typically end at dusk. “Everything I do is fun, in a way, but itap a huge responsibility and itap not a great one to carry alone.”
With her mom, Neva, living in Grand Junction, there is no one left to run the ranch. Her older brothers, Randy and Steve, were .
“There’s no one to take it from me when I’m gone,” she says.
Nottingham’s decision to sell comes as the market for so-called legacy properties heats up after a prolonged lull during the economic decline and .
While the highest of the high-end market might not be sizzling like it did in the early aughts, when amenity-seeking business folk parked millions in acreage that could never return the investment with cattle or hay production, the trophy-ranch buyer appears back on the prowl.
A 265-acre ranch outside Jackson, Wyo., sold for an undisclosed sum this year after listing for $53 million. A year earlier, a nearly 1,900-acre ranch outside Jackson sold for $27.5 million after listing for $100 million.
said buyers are circling his listing for a outside Ogden, Utah, and he is close to landing a buyer for the storied that includes the 14,049-foot Culebra Peak and 18 13,000-foot peaks stretching along 20 miles of the Sangre de Cristo range. He listed . It last sold to a consortium of Texas investors in 2004 for $60 million. In 2007, a few miles down the San Luis Valley, renowned conservationist Louis Bacon, a hedge fund boss from New York, , marking the largest single-home real estate deal in history at the time. That was before billionaire sports team owner in north Texas, which was listed for $725 million.
Last month, Canadian developer Crave Community Co. listed its above Minturn — an alpine parcel by Florida developer Bobby Ginn, who — for $19.5 million, about $10 million below the price Ginn paid in 2004.
More of those dizzyingly grand transactions appear on the horizon as a new round of conservation-minded shoppers are scoping large tracts of land they hope to keep for generations, Mirr says.
“These buyers don’t have to buy these properties. They are not thinking about business or income as much as long-term family dynasties and legacies,” Mirr says. “They are the next stewards and they are taking on the responsibility for protecting and preserving these lands.”
Nottingham isn’t sure what kind of buyer — beyond a billionaire or group of millionaires — might be interested in her ranch, which includes a whopping 100 cubic feet per second of senior water rights, an amount that could serve several thousand homes for a year. (The senior water rights likely are more valuable than the land, Nottingham says, but delivering them anywhere other than the property would require serious legal maneuvering.)
Her father began assembling the ranch above Burns and the Colorado River in the early 1980s. In 1992, the Nottinghams purchased 14,000 acres from the Benton clan, after the . The Nottinghams got $12 million to fund that deal by selling the last remnants of their family homestead along the Eagle River to Swedish shipping magnate Magnus Lindholm, who built a Home Depot and Walmart and has plans for as many as 2,400 homes on the roughly 1,700-acre former sheep ranch in the town of Avon.
While wealthy buyers were raining silly money on sun-bleached ranchers in the early 2000s, the Nottinghams never pondered a sale.
“For some of the old generation of ranchers, I don’t think money means that much to them,” Susan told The Denver Post in 2004. “For me, itap about family. The best thing I do is work with my dad every day.”
The Nottinghams also never jumped on the conservation-easement bandwagon. They were critical of municipalities offering millions in tax dollars for deals that encumbered historic properties with rules forbidding certain uses and development.
“Conservation easements are bad words in my book. I’m not fond of them because … they give government a toehold to private property. And private property rights are such a blessing and such a wonderful gift and to give them away just makes me sick,” says Nottingham, whose eyes alight when talk turns to land trusts and easement deals.
But she’d gladly sell to a conservation group. While itap unlikely any publicly funded entity aiming to preserve the land could come up with $100 million, itap not unthinkable that “10 people with $10 million each” could preserve the working ranch, Swinford says.
Nottingham is not willing, however, to sell the ranch in pieces. She would hate to see a buyer divide it up as well.
“It works so perfectly as a whole,” she says, noting how she never has to buy feed or ship her cattle out to seasonal feeding grounds and is able to keep cattle bound for market in one place, eating the same hay, for their entire life cycle. “Itap such a balanced and perfect operation, it would be sad for any part of it to be taken away. My biggest hope is that the buyer keeps it like it is.”
She’s never been rich. Sure, her family’s land has always been worth a lot, but that never translated into an overabundance of cash in their pockets. Members of her family earned their living by ranching, which means working all day, every day. The list of tasks in the to-do pile never stops growing for a rancher.
“My employees all say, ‘You are great to work for because you never ask me to do anything you wouldn’t do,’ ” she says. “If I ask them to get down in cow manure, I get down there first.”
The ranch, with its four employees, supports itself and its improvements — including an impressive half-mile pivot irrigation system that ranks as one of the largest in the country — with annual sales of those burger-bound yearlings.
And Nottingham is not planning on getting rich. She is planning “a quiet, simple life somewhere” after giving away the money she makes on the sale of her family’s land. She wants to help kids: children in foster care or struggling with health issues.
“All the money will go to charity. I had the best parents in the world. There are millions of kids out there who don’t have that. Maybe I can make a difference,” she says. “That would make all the hard work more meaningful, would it not?”
Visit for more photos and information about the ranch.
CORRECTION: This file was updated at 4:20 p.m. on July 15, 2017, to correct the name of the Benton family, which sold its ranch after the patriarch was killed in a plane crash.
