Brief by Central Staff
Sand Dunes – April 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Some stories have more twists than a soap opera, and the sale of the Baca Ranch to the National Park Service is one of them. The Baca Ranch, about 100,000 acres, sits in eastern Saguache County between Moffat and the crest of the Sangre de Cristo Range, just north of Great Sand Dunes National Monument.
The ranch was part of an exchange for a Mexican land grant of 400,000 acres which belonged to Luis Maria Baca and his heirs in the area of Las Vegas, N.M. Squatters had moved in at the end of the Mexican War in 1848, and rather than evict the squatters, the U.S. government offered the Baca heirs four 100,000-acre tracts instead — one of them in Colorado.
The Baca Ranch has passed through many hands since then. About 20 years ago, it was controlled by Canadian oilman Maurice Strong, who joined with other investors to form American Water Development Inc. AWDI planned to tap the deep aquifer of the Closed Basin at the north end of the San Luis Valley, and export the water to Colorado’s Front Range.
That plan was defeated in Alamosa’s water court about a decade ago, and AWDI sold the ranch, while retaining a royalty interest in any water that might be developed and sold by the new owner.
That new owner was a partnership, Vaca Partners; the managing partner was Gary Boyce. There were several other investors, among them Farallon Capital Management, which included Yale University as an investor-client. Another was New York venture capitalist Peter Hornick.
Boyce proposed a “No Dam Water Project,” which would also have tapped the deep aquifer. However, there were also significant differences from AWDI’s plan. One was that Boyce offered up to 50,000 acre-feet a year of surface water to make up for any local losses.
Activists, ranchers, and farmers in the Valley girded up for another courtroom battle, but along the way, realized that if the federal government purchased the Baca Ranch, then the new landowner would presumably be less likely to tap the aquifer.
Thus arose a lobbying effort which culminated in an April, 2001, agreement. Assuming that a clear title to the Baca could be provided, the Nature Conservancy would buy the Baca Ranch, then sell it to the federal government over time. Part of the ranch would go to expansion of the San Dunes from National Monument to National Park; other parts would go to national forest or a wildlife refuge.
The Nature Conservancy would pay $31.28 million, about twice what the partners paid a decade ago. It would get some of the money from Yale, along with a $7 million loan from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, $5 million from the Colorado State Land Board, and a $3 million loan from Great Outdoors Colorado lotto proceeds.
That deal appears to be getting closer to closure. On March 12, the $31.28 million was placed in escrow with a California title company.
But there’s still some pending litigation. Hornick claims he’s not getting his fair share of the proceeds, and until that’s settled, the title won’t be clear, and the deal won’t go through.
