Sue Anschutz Rodgers sat in her downtown Denver office, far from her beloved Crystal River Ranch, but surrounded by photos of the ranch and a wall of plaques and photos and newspaper clippings evidencing her long support of young people in agriculture and the National Western Stock Show. She is all class in winter white, a swipe of red lipstick, and tennis bracelets. But, she likes to talk cows. She’s my kind of lady.

Anschutz grew up the daughter of oil and gas in Hays, Kansas, and later moved to Wichita when she was 14 or so.

“I thought I had hit the Big Apple,” she said. “But, I would not trade growing up in rural America for anything. The values that I learned, not only from my parents, but from others. The whole environment, and I mean that in the broadest sense, of rural America with the values and the traditions are so important to me.”

Her genes run generations deep in agriculture on both sides of her family. The family left Wichita in pursuit of oil and that brought them to Colorado in the 1960s. Prior to that, though, the family had spent summers in Rocky Mountain National Park, and she said she knew her love of the state ran deep.

The first ranch her father purchased was in South Park in the 1950s. He bought the ranch on the Western Slope, known today as the Crystal River Ranch, in 1966.

He continued to purchase property in the South Park area, adding to that ranch and creating a large operation. In 1975, much to her chagrin, he sold it.

“I was really upset with him, but it was his ranch,” she said. “I really loved that ranch.”

She purchased what was left of the 74 Ranch in South Park in 2008. It had been homesteaded in 1874 and that’s the year the water rights were filed, giving it the name. At the time, she didn’t need the ranch.

“Then I got to thinking about it,” she said. “It was more of an emotional thing. He was asking next to nothing for it, but the sad part was that it had been about 18,000 acres when we sold it and it was down to 380 acres.”

It was a fraction of the ranch her father had sold and nearly all the water rights had been sold to the City of Aurora. But, the price was low.

“I thought, what the heck,” she said. “So, I made an offer and he took it.”

She purchased some of the land around the headquarters and put back together about 2,000 acres of the original 74 Ranch. She doesn’t run cattle there – one of, she said, the smartest things she’s done – but leases the grass out in the summer. Her ranch manager, who was raised nearby in Fairplay, has worked on the ranch since he was a teenager.

“It’s great grass and the hay is excellent, if you have water,” she said. “It has a beauty of its own, but you’ve got to be tough.”

She grew up hearing her dad tell her to treat the land well, because “they’re not making any more of it,” a lesson that stuck with her. When she took over the Crystal River Ranch, it was during a time when conservation was a fighting word for most ranchers.

“You would mention conservation to a rancher, and they would just as soon shoot you as look at you,” she said.

She is one of the founding members of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust board. In speaking to other ranchers, she attributes their hesitancy, in part, to a notion that the land would be taken over by the government.

“That was the big, bad word – government,” she said. “Actually, I think maybe it still is to a certain degree.”

She predicts that land under conservation easements and, thereby protected from development, will be much higher in value and sought after in the coming years and decades. Perhaps, she said, the misunderstanding that a ranch under a conservation easement can’t operate as a ranch is still held.

“It definitely operates as a ranch and that’s what’s keeping a ranch a ranch and not having developers snooping around,” she said. “That’s the sad thing. I’ve watched development around Carbondale, and I’ve watched what’s happened in certain areas that turned one of two big ranches into cities.”

She admits ranching isn’t always profitable. She said sometimes she feels like she’s operating a non-profit. Then, she laughs and says, sometimes she is running a non-profit. She said there’s a difference between conservation and preservation. She likes both, she said, but she’s a country girl so conservation, ranching, and the land always win.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication.