This column is part of a regular weekly series highlighting the largest land sales recorded each week through the Lands of America Comparable Sales program. To learn more and participate in the program, or to subscribe, click here.
Congratulations to Ranch Marketing Associates’ Ron Morris for his sale of 12,505-acre Boyer Ranch in southern Colorado on December 15, 2017. The Custer County ranch was sold for $8 million.
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Rimmed by the snowcapped peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range—including five of the state’s 53 “14ers,” among them 14,294-foot Crestone Peak, the seventh-highest—Boyer Ranch is a second-generation grazing and cattle operation that’s been run by the same family since 1942. Of its total acreage, 11,380 are deeded acres.
Just six miles from the small cowboy town of Westcliffe, the well-irrigated ranch is an assemblage of homesteads from the late 1800s and provides high-altitude grazing for up to 550 cow-calf pairs and steady income from its annual hay harvest. A jet-capable regional airport offers convenient access, while Colorado Springs lies less than an hour and a half to the north.
Improvements on the ranch include two modest homes and a bunkhouse, a pair of wood barns, shop and garage, and a good set of working corrals and scale. Large numbers of antelope range freely on the ranch with elk migrating through at various times along with turkey and the occasional black bear. One artesian pond is stocked with trout and the ranch is close to National Forest and several mountain trailheads.
Occupying what is known as Wet Mountain Valley between the Sangre de Cristo peaks to the west and Wet Mountains to the east, the area also abuts Great Sand Dunes National Park on the southwestern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo range. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains (Spanish for “Blood of Christ”) are the southernmost subrange of the Rockies.
The county seat of Westcliffe is a rural community of fewer than 5,000 residents that has been recognized, along with neighboring Silver Cliff, by the International Dark-Sky Association for their lack of light pollution and visibility of the night sky. Awarded in 2015, the two towns are the highest of the existing 16 certified locations around the world, with their 8,000-foot altitude getting stargazers that bit closer to the stars and Milky Way.
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