Local Family Protects Historic Ranch

On March 27, 2025, Montezuma Land Conservancy (MLC) completed a conservation project with a local family permanently protecting 720 acres of land on Chicken Creek, five miles north of the town of Mancos.  

The Hackley Place, part of the Reddert Ranch, has been an operational cattle ranch for generations. The property is located on beautiful rolling meadows leading up to healthy ponderosa pine forests above Chicken Creek. Half of the property shares a border with San Juan National Forest, creating a buffer and helping to extend migratory pathways for elk and mule deer. The ranch is also the highest private property in this portion of the Mancos watershed, and, paired with its healthy ponderosa pine forest and 17 acres of wetlands, will be a vital piece for protecting this watershed for future generations.  

For Ryan Brown, on behalf of the Reddert/Brown family, “The Hackley Place on Chicken Creek has been a part of our family’s Reddert Ranch for generations. My brothers and I used to ride there with our grandfather from our home on Echo Basin Rd. We’d camp and fish, check on the yearlings, and discover signs of ancient peoples, homesteaders, and lumbermen.  It was an adventure I repeated with my own two boys when they were young. The property supports the many uses of the adjacent San Juan Forest public lands; cattlemen pass through our place on the way to and from their allotments, timber thinning goes on across the private/public boundary, elk find spring habitat in the meadows, hikers enjoy the views in summer and fall from the Chicken Creek Trails, and Chicken Creek Nordic skiers pass by in winter. It’s for all these reasons that our family thinks preserving this property as a transition and gateway to public lands is important not only for us, but for the future of the community.”

With the addition of this new conservation easement, MLC has now placed permanent protections on 6,800 acres of land in the Mancos watershed, including over four miles of the Mancos River and nearly a mile of Chicken Creek.  

In addition to the Brown/Reddert family and their spouses and children, this project was made possible thanks to $50,000 in funding from Keep It Colorado’s Transaction Cost Assistance Program. MLC is incredibly honored and grateful to work with landowners and community partners to protect the landscapes we all love and cherish in Southwest Colorado. 

In total, MLC has conserved over 50,000 acres of open space, wildlife habitat, public access trails, and agricultural lands throughout Montezuma, Dolores, and San Miguel counties.