Five years ago this month, the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust and Yampa Valley Land Trust merged under the banner of CCALT’s Yampa Valley Conservation Partnership.

This partnership was designed to combine CCALT’s expertise in holding a large portfolio of conservation easements and ensuring that newly created easements meet landowners’ unique needs, with YVLT’s commitment to Routt County’s specific conservation needs. In the five years since this successful merger, the Yampa Valley Conservation Partnership has made a concrete difference in keeping the landscapes of Routt County and Northwest Colorado open and available for agricultural production.

Conservation partnerships between local landowners and easement organizations like CCALT provide tangible benefits to our region’s land, water, wildlife and people.

In the five years since the merger, CCALT has worked with landowner families up and down the Yampa Valley on 36,665 acres of conservation easements. These projects range from multigenerational ranching operations to public access projects with world-class fishing and mountain bike trails, but the common denominator across all of them is that placing an easement on the property guarantees the perpetual health of that landscape.

Among the many public benefits provided by a conservation easement are restrictions on building and subdivision within a property. This guarantees that a region’s view corridors stay open (as is the case up and down roads including U.S. Highway 40, Routt County Road 129 and Routt County Road 131). It also ensures that wildlife habitat, including big game migration corridors for elk and deer and the diverse sagebrush steppe ecosystems needed by Columbian sharp-tailed grouse and greater sage grouse, remains intact.

CCALT easements tie water to the conserved land, also ensuring that Northwest Colorado’s water remains available for agricultural production and wildlife habitat. This requirement not only keeps irrigated fields available for migratory bird habitat but also, when deployed at the scale that Northwest Colorado’s agricultural families have deployed it, ensures the ongoing longevity of an agricultural landscape and community.

The YVCP is a continuation and extension of conservation partnerships that Northwest Colorado has built for more than 30 years. Fetcher Ranch in Clark, which celebrated its 75^th birthday in September and has been home to four generations of the Fetcher family, is an excellent example of the long-term conservation commitments that the YVCP continues to build on.

The Fetcher family acquired their ranch along the Elk River in 1949 and quickly became pillars of Routt County’s agricultural community. Years later, Jay Fetcher was one of CCALT’s founders, sparking agricultural conservation efforts statewide and becoming a vocal champion of conservation work in his home of Routt County, where it provided vital benefits to the area’s working landscapes and provided individual families with needed resources to stay on their land.

Today, Fetcher Ranch is entirely conserved, protecting a significant stretch of the Elk River, critical wildlife habitat, public viewsheds and fertile agricultural land. Neighboring families around the Elk River corridor have done similar conservation on their own land, and nearly 17,000 acres of the corridor are now conserved.

With a deep commitment to the families, traditions and landscapes that have made Routt County what it is, CCALT and the YVCP look forward to building on five years of partnership. Conservation, after all, is a value that unites Routt County — it is fundamental to supporting our unmatched quality of life, and the land trust looks forward to years ahead supporting Routt County’s long-standing conservation ethic.

To learn more about CCALT and the YVCP’s commitments to local conservation, please visit ccalt.org or contact Owen Yager at 720-557-8269 or owen@ccalt.org.