Initiative to boost open-space preservation

Matt Hildner

Daily Press Writer

MONTROSE — Four Colorado conservation groups are hoping to increase preservation efforts in the Northern San Juan mountains and have hired the director of a local museum to spearhead education efforts toward that end.

The Northern San Juan Initiative hopes to preserve open space and ranchland in the area and will draw help from the Colorado Conservation Trust, the Nature Conservancy, the Ridgway-based Trust for Land Restoration and Montrose’s Black Canyon Regional Land Trust.

Ginny Harrington, director of the Ouray County History Museum, will lead the initiative. She said one of her main tasks will be to get information to landowners who might be interested in using conservation easements to limit development on their property.

Harrington grew up in Montrose but she comes from a family that’s been involved in ranching in Ouray County since the late 1800s. Moreover, she lives on the Double RL Ranch near Dallas Divide where her husband is the ranch manager.

“I love the ranching. It’s in my blood,” she said.

She said ranchlands need to be a part of the area’s future.

“I feel that our ranchlands, open space, wildlife habitat and the view we wake up to each morning are part of the essence of our communities along with the great people that take care of these lands and have made them their homes,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Harrington has also gotten to know area ranchers through her work on the Ouray County Ranching Oral History Project and the effort to establish a ranching museum in the county.

Some of the area covered by the initiative could be especially vulnerable to development. A September report by the Colorado Conservation Trust identified both Montrose and Ouray counties as areas with high potential threat to open space but limited capacity to protect them.

Adell Heneghan, executive director of the Black Canyon Regional Land Trust, said her organization will provide the administrative oversight for the initiative. She added that the three other groups serve the initiative with expertise, while the Colorado Conservation trust is also providing a large percentage of the funding for the initiative.

Heneghan said the initiative’s main function will be to serve as an information source and that any of the four groups could end up holding conservation easements from the effort.

“We won’t be holding all of the easements by any means,” Heneghan said.

Harrington said the initiative will operate out of the Independence building in Ridgway, next to the offices that house that the Trust for Land Restoration.

Contact Matt Hildner via e-mail at matth@montrosepress.com