What does a 172,000-acre ranch become when its owner starts asking what comes next?
Trinchera Ranch is the largest contiguous privately owned ranch in Colorado — high-altitude grasslands, Sangre de Cristo montane forests, and wetlands rising from the San Luis Valley floor to three fourteeners. It carries the largest conservation easement ever donated to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
This is not a developer asking permission to build. This is a conservationist asking what stewardship looks like at scale, over decades, in a landscape that matters.
- ~172,000
- acres
- 14,345 ft
- Blanca Peak
- ~3,500
- elk under management
- ~800,000
- connected protected acres
The protection is already permanent.
Louis Bacon bought Trinchera from the Forbes family in 2007 for approximately $175 million. Within five years he had donated a conservation easement on nearly 77,000 acres to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — the act that established the Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area as the 558th unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System. Paired with a perpetual easement on the adjoining 90,000-acre Blanca Ranch, the total protection approaches 170,000 acres.
Secretary Ken Salazar called it the largest single conservation easement ever donated to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Combined with the Colorado Open Lands easement from the Forbes era and the Tercio/Red River donation, approximately 800,000 acres of connected protected land stretch from Great Sand Dunes National Park to northern New Mexico.
| Instrument | Acres | Year | Holder | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colorado Open Lands (Forbes era) | ~80,000 | 2004 | Colorado Open Lands | Tier 0 |
| USFWS — Trinchera Ranch | ~77,000 | 2012 | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | Tier 0 |
| USFWS — Blanca Ranch (paired) | 90,000 | 2012 | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | Tier 0 |
| Tercio / Red River Ranch | ~21,000 | 2013 | Colorado Open Lands | Tier 0 |
These easements are perpetual and run with the land. They are the first constraint on any future use, and they bind every successor owner. Any co-stewardship structure must first be reviewed by outside counsel for compatibility with the existing easement terms.
The question of what Trinchera becomes is genuinely open.
David Norden — formerly CEO of Taos Ski Valley, the world’s only B-Corp certified ski resort, and now Chief Executive of Bacon’s property portfolio — is evaluating conservation and community-access uses for Trinchera. The question of what the ranch becomes over the next ten to twenty years has not been answered.
Three threads run concurrently: Trinchera itself, where regenerative ranching, ecological restoration, research, and possible community access are all live possibilities; the bison corridor, connecting Trinchera to The Nature Conservancy’s Medano-Zapata Ranch and ONIYA’s San Luis Valley rewilding vision; and the bioregional frame, in which Taos Ski Valley at the headwaters and Trinchera in the Sangre de Cristo form one contiguous story.
Read the full narrative on the story page, the land and ecology on place, and the lineage of this ground on history.
- DOI — Salazar Establishes 558th National Wildlife Refuge Unit — Tier 0
- Colorado Open Lands — Sangre de Cristo Greenbelt — Tier 0
- Norden/Bacon prospect profile (Alvord, Oliizoi, June 2026) — Tier 3