The Fragile Frontier

Matt Moorhead has worked in the Southern High Plains for nearly three decades, traveling among ranches and preserves, hiking canyons and trekking through amber-colored shortgrass prairies. Over the years, there have been encounters he’ll never forget: the massive snapping turtle that may have predated World War II; the gray fox staring out from a cave with a rare, unguarded curiosity; and, not long after he joined The Nature Conservancy in the 1990s, the first time he set eyes on the sweeping landscape he would devote his career to protecting.

“Standing on a canyon rim, you look out over it, and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe people don’t even know this is here,’” says Moorhead. Today, he’s the business and partnership development advisor for The Nature Conservancy’s Southern High Plains Initiative, which aims to keep this ecosystem healthy, connected and economically viable for generations.

Beatty Canyon Ranch has been in Steve Wooten’s family since 1929, spanning rugged country along the Purgatoire River and bordering Comanche National Grassland—home to one of Colorado’s largest bighorn sheep populations. Like many ranchers in the 21st century, the Wootens have faced rising costs and shrinking margins—pressures that have pushed neighboring properties toward subdivision into ranchettes and vacation parcels. Hoping to keep their own ranch intact, they worked with nonprofit organization Colorado Open Lands and regional partners to place nearly 14,000 acres under a conservation easement.

The agreement allows traditional grazing and hunting but prohibits subdivision, development, mining and logging. In return, the Wootens received a combination of compensation and tax benefits—enough to bring their children into the family business and stabilize the ranch’s future. Today, Steve and Joy still ride out regularly with their younger daughter and son-in-law, while their older daughter’s family runs another century-old ranch nearby.

“Joy and I are the fourth generation,” Steve says, “and we hope that it passes on. It’s incredible to think that maybe even the sixth generation is going to have a chance.” But whatever path their grandchildren choose, he adds, the land will endure.

Fire has shaped the Southern High Plains for millennia, cycling nutrients, suppressing woody plants and renewing grasses. Historically, fires were set intentionally by Native Americans to attract game. Although federal policy long emphasized fire suppression, controlled burning has once again become an essential conservation tool—one that Fire Manager Phillip Daw knows well.

Daw, who works with the Arapaho and Cheyenne Tribes in Oklahoma, has spent 26 years on firefighting crews.

“I’ve seen the destructiveness [of wildfires],” he says. “I’ve also seen the aftereffects of wildfires, the ecological change that actually did the landscape good.”

Today, Daw leads prescribed burns, which improve the prairie’s resilience and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire by lowering fuel loads. He also helps conduct cultural burns—smaller, targeted fires that encourage the growth of plants, like sage, which hold a cultural significance.

These practices, Daw says, carry on a deep legacy. “It allows me to reconnect as a Native American. I feel connected to the land when I’m out there, where my people came from.” Even through displacement, he adds, Plains Tribes never forgot how to care for their home. “We knew what fire could do.”

When The Nature Conservancy acquired Smoky Valley Ranch in 1999, it became TNC’s largest conservation purchase in Kansas—and now it helps protect over 20,000 acres of prairie where bison roam, prairie chickens perform their distinctive mating dances and chalk bluffs glow at sunset. Ranch manager Justin Roemer arrived as a college intern and couldn’t shake the place. “I was going to find any way I could to come back to this spot,” he says.

Today, the working ranch welcomes hikers and horseback riders and offers audio tours that illuminate the ecology and history of the High Plains. It also serves as a laboratory for sustainable grazing practices, an increasingly vital approach as climate change and invasive species reshape the prairie. Historically, wild grazers like bison helped maintain plant diversity and improve soil health. Now, domesticated animals fill that role.

“We’re using cattle, and bison as well, to mimic that type of management,” Roemer says. “Without them, things would look a lot different.”

Indeed, the stakes are high here and beyond this prairie, as new research shows that well-managed cattle grazing can improve the ability of grasslands to sequester carbon.

For Roemer, the work is both ecological and deeply personal.

“Just the thrill and the excitement that I get from seeing a wide-open prairie or a buffalo grazing on a landscape... I can’t fathom living without them in this world.”