Narrative

The question that defines this place

What does a 172,000-acre ranch — the largest in Colorado, carrying the largest conservation easement in the history of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — become when its owner starts asking what comes next?

Slot declared, asset pending. Source identified: DrunkDriver (Wikimedia Commons). CC BY-SA 3.0.
The people who came before

At least ten thousand years of occupancy.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains and San Luis Valley have been home to Indigenous peoples for at least 10,000 years. The Ute people — Mouache and Capote bands — inhabited these mountains and valleys. Spanish colonists established the San Luis Valley settlements in the 1850s, among the oldest non-Indigenous communities in Colorado. The Hispano acequia system of communal irrigation channels represents the oldest water rights in Colorado and a living governance tradition.

Taos Pueblo, approximately 75 miles south, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America, occupied for over a thousand years. Any bioregional engagement in this landscape must honor the depth and complexity of these relationships.

What happens next

Three concurrent threads.

David Norden — formerly CEO of Taos Ski Valley, the world’s only B-Corp certified ski resort, now Chief Executive of Bacon’s property portfolio — is evaluating conservation and community-access uses for Trinchera.

  1. Trinchera itself — regenerative ranching, ecological restoration, research, possible community access.
  2. Bison corridor — ONIYA’s San Luis Valley rewilding vision connects Trinchera to The Nature Conservancy’s Medano-Zapata Ranch and beyond.
  3. Bioregional frame — Taos Ski Valley at the headwaters plus Trinchera in the Sangre de Cristo forms one contiguous bioregional story.
The bison question

Trinchera has no bison today.

Adjacent TNC Medano-Zapata Ranch runs approximately 2,000 bison on about 50,000 acres of pasture. Sixty miles south, Tara Sheahan’s ONIYA project is building the cultural and relational groundwork for bison restoration in the San Luis Valley. Colorado SB25-053, signed May 2025 and effective January 2026, dual-listed bison as both wildlife and livestock — the first state-level policy enabling private-land bison restoration without the federal-land regulatory risk that constrained permits elsewhere.

The geographic triangle — Trinchera in the north San Luis Valley, ONIYA in Conejos County to the south, and TNC Medano-Zapata between them — creates a plausible migration corridor. This is not metaphorical. At the scale of Trinchera’s 172,000 acres plus TNC’s 103,000, a viable bison herd and movement corridor is ecologically real.

Slot declared, asset pending.
The Islas Secas model

What conservation-first looks like fully expressed.

Bacon’s other major property — Islas Secas, a 14-island volcanic archipelago in Panama’s Gulf of Chiriquí — shows what his conservation-first approach looks like when fully expressed: 13 of 14 islands permanently untouched, 100% solar, 100% water reclamation, no single-use plastic, and partnerships with Smithsonian TRI, MarViva, and Panama Audubon across more than 750 marine species.

If Trinchera is the question, Islas Secas is the evidence that Bacon answers questions like this with stewardship rather than extraction.

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