Land That I Love
Bob Eppenauer and other ranchers in the Davis Mountains want to protect their beloved high country from encroaching subdivisions and golf courses. But the only way to save it may be to give it away.
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Two years ago, Beavers and his wife, Anna Whit Watkins, took early retirement from the park service and, cushioned with a fat stock portfolio and a willingness to invest their retirement money in land, started looking around for a smaller community where they could raise their son, Travis, and where Watkins could board horses and set up operations for her business as a dressage instructor.
The Davis range was good country that had been managed decently, Beavers knew. Watkins could really live anywhere since she flies around Texas and the United States for classes with her students. The Nature Conservancy stitched together a complicated deal involving two other couples, and Beavers and Watkins took possession of four thousand acres of an upswept chuck of open grasslands known as the Observatory Pasture of the old U Up U Down Ranch. Beavers and Watkins donated easements, promised they wouldn’t run goats or sheep, and without being asked, pledged a portion of their land to the Conservancy upon their deaths.
Their headquarters contains their family residence, a barn, a workshop, stables, an 18,000-square-foot indoor riding arena—the first in the region—and grain and equipment garages, all under the same roof. To address Conservancy concerns, the building was erected close to the road and painted a muted beige to blend in with the landscape. On his own, Beavers installed a system to capture and store rainwater, like the old ranches used to do (“I can get seventy gallons when the dew rolls off the roof,” he brags) and an elaborate composting system to recycle horse manure.
“I’m not a rancher,” Beavers explains by way of introduction, but he knows how ranching works. After showing me around, he launches into a long spiel about what he calls “conservation beef,” his idea for marketing natural beef raised on ranches like his own. Now that Watkins’ dressage operation is up and running, Beavers is working with other ranchers to sell Davis Mountains natural beef to consumers at a premium. By cutting out all the middlemen, cattle raisers might actually get a decent price for their product again, while the land remains free of pesticides and consumers get the option of buying beef without hormonal or chemical additives.
“Ranchers may have to manage their land a little differently, but it doesn’t require them to give up control or change their way of life,” he says of the concept. “It’s the way beef was produced before World War Two.” He knows it’s a hard sell to the locals, but maybe he’s onto something. “A lot of people over the fence are watching,” he says.
Leaving Beavers behind, King drives toward the McDonald Observatory, stopping at an overlook to point out other pieces of the U Up U Down that the Conservancy sold to make the core preserve affordable. “Tim and Lynn Crowley bought this beautiful valley,” he says. Tim is a Houston attorney and Lynn owned a prominent art gallery there before the couple moved to Marfa, thirty miles south, a year ago. Tim’s friend, Houston businessman Jeff Fort, and his wife, Marion Barthelme, bought the Limpia tract; Beavers and his wife and two other couples purchased the Observatory tract; and Cina Alexander, a distant cousin of King’s, acquired the Locke’s Gap tract. Since then, Alexander has also purchased the 27,000-acre Caldwell Ranch, which includes portions of Madera Canyon and one of the major concentrations of Indian pictographs in Texas, donating conservation easements on both ranches.
King has a satisfied look on his face. “Those ranches won’t be anything but what they are now: ranches,” he says. He drives past the Eppenauer spread, which includes a portion that used to be the Fisher Ranch— “I tried to sell this when I was a realtor,” he says—and the entrance to the Davis Mountains Preserve that now belongs to the Conservancy. King became a true believer when he walked this land with Don McIvor and climbed Mount Livermore.
“We did a portfolio analysis and discovered Livermore was teeming with rare plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. It’s a biological gold mine. If we were going to protect that biodiversity, we had to figure out the ecological borders and political boundaries. So we designed the preserve around the biology.” To pay for it, the Conservancy initially sought to sell seven 40-acre tracts in the high country for $2 million each, giving owners and guests access to a larger commons of almost 20,000 acres. Only one potential buyer came forward. “We found everyone was scared of common ownership,” he says. That idea was scrapped in 1996 in favor of carving up the acreage into three tracts. In 1998 the plan was retooled into six tracts, buyers lined up, and the deal was made.
The Davis Mountains Project is seeking more easements in Madera Canyon by raising money for land acquisition and by partnering with the Buffalo Trail Boy Scout Camp of Midland, which owns a wilderness in the northern hills near Middle Madera Canyon. “The whole deal here is getting in position,” King says. The Meadows Foundation, the Brown Foundation, and Houston Endowment have provided grants. Smaller donors are steered to the Friends of the Davis Mountains, which organizes public events such as last summer’s hummingbird seminar at the preserve and Christmas Tree Day, when area residents are encouraged to cut down young pines in designated areas. Getting everyone involved is part of the plan too.
“The thing about the Davis Mountains is, everyone wants to live here,” King says. “There are a hundred and fifty thousand people coming to McDonald every year, and some of them like what they see so much, they want to relocate here. So we’ve become a land-planning service. We’re looking at ways to accommodate development. I’ve been approached to put together a village plan for Fort Davis.”
Though there are still a number of ranchers who view it all suspiciously, feeding on the perception that the Conservancy is fronting a bunch of rich carpetbaggers who will eventually turn the land over to the National Park Service, King is undaunted. He says more-vocal critics like Lynn Crittendon and his neighbor Ben Gearhart, who run ranches on the southwestern flank of the Davis range, are good guys. “They don’t need us. They’re doing great on their own. They live on the land with their families. I don’t need to talk to them about easements. It’s the land fixing to be sold that we have to work on.”
Cane bluestem grass is coming back in the core preserve surrounding Mount Livermore. So are black bears, which were eradicated by sheep ranchers in the thirties. But Limpia Creek, a year-round stream for most of the past century, went dry during the drought. If plants like cat’s claw and alligator juniper, invasive species that are prodigious water users, can be kept under control, the creek could revive, leading to the reintroduction of Rio Grande cutthroat trout, once native to the Davis range. The Conservancy is also studying managed wildfires as a means to restore the plant ecosystem.
The Davis Mountains Project won’t be doomed if Bob Eppenauer decides not to get on board, but the likelihood of development will increase. The imminent expansion of the McDonald Observatory visitors information center will bring more visitors to the high country, and more visitors mean more people falling in love with the mountains and wanting a piece of them. Eppenauer could put a small lodge on his land within walking distance of the new center, if he wants to exploit the situation. (Of course, he might be able to put in a lodge after the Conservancy acquired a conservation easement, as the Sprouls may do.)
King turns off the ignition of the Land Rover and points out a rise. “There’s Robber’s Roost. This is all the Caldwell Ranch, everything you’re looking at.” Breathtaking vistas unfold wherever my head turns. I see dramatic skyward sweeps of hard rock breaking out of the soil—uplifts, peaks, outcroppings, crevices. Far off in the distance are the jagged lines of Sawtooth Mountain, a sky cathedral if I’ve ever seen one. Fine tall grasslands spiked with cholla and yucca flourish in the folds of the slopes. On the other side of one nearby ridge is Madera Canyon.
King is talking about all the competing interests that he has to deal with, but I don’t hear him. I’m thinking about the relationship between him and Bob Eppenauer that holds the key to the future of the Davis Mountains. They approach the problem of preservation from totally different directions, and yet perhaps they are not so different after all. King comes from a famous ranching family and knows too well the story of how a family ranch became a corporation. Bob Eppenauer too has deep roots in ranching history. His family’s involvement with the land goes back six generations to the Fowlkes family, the founders of the Mountain Springs Ranch, which Bob’s grandfather, a Fort Worth wildcatter, bought in 1937. And although pretty has had nothing to do with the legacy he’s carrying on, pretty may allow Bob Eppenauer to keep the land in the family. Looking out at his vision of God’s country, I marvel that it can move King and Eppenauer, two men who have such different views of what they want for the Davis Mountains, to agree on this one thing: This land is special. So special, you hope they’re both right and their separate visions can be realized, and that the economics of pretty will allow it to stay just the way it is. Wild forever.
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