Ranchers keep leery eye on Army
PIÑON CANYON - Life clings tenuously here to the limestone soil, dry as baby powder and so fragile that wagon tracks still trace the Santa Fe Trail more than 100 years after pioneers rolled southwest.
Ranchers and soldiers are uneasy neighbors, but they agree on one thing: it takes a lot of land to do just about anything in this arid region.
Cattle need 60 acres apiece to survive on the short-grass prairie, and ranches often stretch across tens of thousands of acres.
The Army’s own spread, the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site, about 150 miles southeast of Fort Carson, covers 375 square miles and is facing a major increase in training demands.
Maj. Gen. Robert Mixon says Fort Carson will soon be responsible for training 25,000 active-duty troops and every Reserve and National Guard soldier west of the Mississippi River — more than 230,000 of them.
Mixon knows Piñon Canyon won’t take the pounding of up to 50,000 soldiers rampaging their way through mock war. Without more land, experts say, boots and 72-ton tanks will grind the area into a moonscape.
Stopping by the canyon to visit troops in training, Mixon says he needs as much as 725 square miles more to get the job done.
“I’m not in the business of ‘how,’” he said. “We have defined the requirement, and it’s up to the Army to say how it gets done.”
The Pentagon is studying a proposal to acquire land in Las Animas County. Any action could be years away, but ranchers are already worried that expansion could doom a lifestyle that’s been fading because of drought, economics and uncertainty.
On the other side of the Purgatoire River valley, 15 miles from Mixon and his soldiers, John Albert Doherty has been tossing and turning at night. His nephew, Steve Wooten, says Doherty has been distracted doing simple ranch tasks such as fixing fences on the 91,000-acre spread that’s been in the family since the 1920s.
Doherty, with leathery skin and vise-like hands, sees the Army’s need for more room colliding with the pastoral life he’s enjoyed since childhood. The Army hasn’t said what land it wants, but Doherty thinks it’ll take the ranch.
“We just got our first comfortable place,” Doherty said, gesturing around the remodeled adobe. “It’s driving us crazy.”
LAND ‘A FINITE RESOURCE’
The prairie is slow to heal.
“It’s going to get tougher as the training tempos increase,” Mead Klavetter, a wildlife biologist for the maneuver site, said as he surveyed the canyon’s bone-dry grass. “You’ll see more damage, and it will take longer to recover.”
Walking through the canyon, Klavetter seems to know every rock. Occasionally, he stops to pick up an ancient arrowhead out of the dirt or to point in amazement at the rudimentary creations ranchers built of stone or the thready juniper logs.
“They were tough people,” he said.
Two weeks of light use by the 2nd Brigade Combat Team this month has taken a toll. Even though Piñon Canyon was used for just a few hundred soldiers in short rotations, enough land was disturbed to cause dust storms that lashed through tent encampments.
Tom Warren, who heads Fort Carson’s environmental quality efforts, said the dust kicked up by the light infantry unit is nothing compared with what a few tanks and armored troop carriers can do.
“We can turn this place into a dust bowl if we aren’t careful,” said Warren, a tall man with a bushy beard who has worked for Fort Carson since the Army began buying and seizing ranchland for the training area in the early 1980s.
“My focus is what I’ve got, and what I’ve got is a finite resource.”
US AND THEM
Ranchers remember the real Dust Bowl over morning coffee at The Kim Outpost in the town of Kim, which has seen its population drop to 66 today from 100 in 1980, when the government first bought land for Piñon Canyon.
Back in the Great Depression, a severe drought on the Plains parched the land. Kim was bombarded by black clouds of dirt.
“It didn’t hurt us as bad as they did,” joked Wyneal Alfrey, in town to deliver a load of hay to rancher Jack Pearce.
Pickup bumpers might carry yellow-ribbon stickers supporting troops, but here the Army has become “them,” as opposed to “us.”
Pearce arrives for his cup of coffee and talks about why, in the midst of hardship, ranchers are unwilling to give the Army another square inch of prairie.
People here are still stung that the government seized half of the land for the 240,000-acre site through eminent domain. That power allows it to obtain land at market prices — currently about $300 an acre near the canyon.
“I’m not for it at all,” Pearce said. “Why do they need that much land anyway?”
People are also worried about the dwindling number of ranches in the region.
“We’ve lost a lot of people,” Pearce said. “Your kids get out of school, and there’s nothing to keep them here.”
ARMY SEEKS REALISM
On a mock battlefield in the canyon, Command Sgt. Maj. Terrance McWilliams tries to prepare troops for Iraq. The Piñon Canyon site is dotted with mock Iraqi villages, and Fort Carson’s top enlisted man would like to see a larger and even more realistic battlefield.
“We’re practicing for the distances that the commanders will see in Iraq,” he said.
Iraq has radically changed how the Army fights. Brigades, which were responsible for just a few miles of past battlefields, now control restive areas the size of whole states.
Mixon says commanders are using computer simulations for much of the mock battle pitting the 2nd Brigade Combat Team against simulated insurgents.
But the more realism, the better.
Commanders want to stay close to Fort Carson. Sending troops to other training sites can cost millions of dollars, and those places are already booked as the Army readies soldiers for Iraq.
‘NEIGHBORING’ AS A VERB
Atop a mesa 20 miles southwest of Kim, the Patterson family says the Army should look elsewhere for land.
“It just strikes me as wrong,” said R.C. Patterson, a former professional rodeo cowboy and father of two. “The soldiers are fighting and dying to defend America. Look around — it doesn’t get more American than this.”
Patterson doesn’t think the Army will want his land, south of U.S. 160 and running on the flat-topped hills toward New Mexico. But he worries about losing his neighbors.
“Neighboring” is a verb here, used to describe how ranchers get together from miles around for socialization and labor-intensive tasks, from round-ups to branding.
The social centers of the farflung community are the Kim Outpost store and the Kim School, which has 60 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
R.C.’s wife, Joanna, fears that the school, which now has about 60 students, would close if the Army expands.
“Then what would we do?” she said.
In an area where the average household income barely tops $25,000, the Pattersons survive by raising 200 head of cattle and selling R.C.’s invention, a cattle-feeding system that lets farmers adjust the ratio of nutrient-rich hay to bulky straw.
The whole family joins in everything they do. Even Kamrynn, 4, is in the saddle as they round up 40 Angus cattle to move the animals to another pasture.
“We don’t want this shoved down our throats,” R.C. said. “We’re not anti-Army, but it’s getting that way.”
ARMY’S PR BATTLE TOUGH
Fort Carson’s Warren knows he’ll face ranchers’ 25-year-old hard feelings from the original Army land acquisition.
“Neighbors lost their friendships over this,” he said.
After rumors of the Army plan leaked this spring, the Army assigned a full-time spokeswoman to deal with canyon residents. The goal is to calm nerves and reach out to those who might be willing to sell their land.
It’s an uphill fight.
Longtime supporters of Fort Carson in Washington, D.C., are lukewarm to the plans. U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard has already thrown a political speed bump in the path of expansion.
Allard wants a series of studies done before any land is purchased.
Another sticky issue is whether the Army will buy land from willing sellers, or if it’ll seize it under condemnation laws.
Willing sellers would be preferable, but Warren says Fort Carson officials also want contiguous plots of land.
LEASES, OPTIONS SOUGHT
At the wheel of his fourwheel-drive Ford pickup, Steve Wooten says his land is serving a higher purpose by putting meat on tables. He has a herd of 350 Angus cattle and sells their calves.
“Why can’t the Army work as hard to use the land they have as we have?” he asks.
Wooten was raised on this ranch, with its dramatic red cliffs that stretch from the Purgatoire to the sky. He said the Army isn’t offering options that would help keep ranchers on their land, like cutting lease deals for training exercises.
“That’s what gives the conception that this is a land grab,” he says.
In the back seat with Milo the dog on her lap, Wooten’s wife, Joy, said she’s been through droughts and fires, but this is tougher.
“Most of us have been here all our lives,” she says.
Lon Robertson, owner of the Kim Outpost, pecks away at his computer between serving cups of coffee.
He’s president of the Piñon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition, which now claims 400 members, and he’s updating the group’s Web site, www. pinoncanyon.com.
When Roberston was a boy, Kim had three general stores, a bank, a weekly newspaper and a hotel. Now his general store, with its lone gas pump out front, is the sole business.
“A lot of people say this is a dead area,” he says. “And if we don’t stop the Army, it will be.”
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or
tom.roeder@gazette.com
PIÑON CANYON HISTORY
Humankind has always left its mark in the rocks of Piñon Canyon.
The oldest signs go back thousands of years. Circles of stone show where tribes camped along the creeks that feed the Purgatoire River. The neighboring cliff faces became like an artist’s gallery for the tribes, with pictures of everything from stylized shamans to Big Horn hunts chipped into the red sandstone.
In the early 1800s, trappers came from the east in search of beaver pelts. One of these pioneers was explorer Kit Carson, who scratched his name into the cliffs on the canyon’s south side.
The population grew along with the Santa Fe Trail, which passed from La Junta to Trinidad along the short-grass prairie. Ruins of stone buildings used as rest stops for a stagecoach that followed the trail can still be found.
PIÑON CANYON EXPANSION BY THE NUMBERS
240,000
Acres of land the Army already has for its Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site.
400,000
Additional acres sought by Army commanders.
25,000
Soldiers at Fort Carson by 2008, up from about 15,000 in recent years.
230,000
National Guard soldiers who will train under commanders at Fort Carson.
$28 million
Cost to purchase the training site in the 1980s.
$300
Rough cost of an acre of ranchland in southeastern Colorado.
25,000
Cattle that could be forced off land by the expansion, according to an opposition group.
5,275
Residents in unincorporated Las Animas County, where the additional land is sought.
66
Population of Kim, Colo., a municipality on the training site’s eastern edge.
60
Acres of grass needed on the range around Kim for each head of cattle.
