The way of the land

This is the second in an occasional series on life on a modern ranch.

SAN JUAN COUNTY — This spring, Heidi Redd went to India. She'd been invited to a wedding there, and she decided to make a trip of it, stay for three weeks, see the Taj Mahal and celebrate her 65th birthday in an exotic country.

But three weeks proved to be too long to be away. After one week, she says, she was homesick.

Redd has lived for 40 years at the Dugout Ranch. She married a rancher's son and came as a newlywed to what was then a remote part of San Juan County. She has lived for 40 years surrounded by red cliffs.

She and her husband, Robert, bought the place from his family — 5,000 acres, with grazing rights on hundreds of thousands more. The majority of the land their cows graze, 228,000 acres, belongs to the Bureau of Land Management.

In its entirety, the Dugout Ranch stretches over deserts, creeks, mesas and mountains. It is home to rare wildflowers, stands of willow and ancient cottonwoods, wild turkeys, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, Mexican spotted owls, cougars and bears.

Redd didn't know anything about cattle or range management when she came to the Dugout. She'd grown up in Idaho, but as a town girl. She'd majored in education.

Still, she was an adventurer. She'd been the first woman in the sky-diving club at Utah State University. From the beginning, she embraced ranching — learning from Robert and from the seminars that the young couple were always eager to take. She felt this life was the one she'd been born to live.

The Redds had two sons and were happy for a long time. Then, after more than 20 years, they divorced.

Robert moved away. Redd stayed on, a single-mom rancher who had to figure out how she was going to pay her ex-husband for his half of the land.

When they'd started out, the ranch was 20 miles down a dirt road. But the road was paved in the '70s. Two lanes of asphalt now stretch from U.S. 191 past the Redds' houses and corrals, into the Needles entrance of Canyonlands National Park.

The tourists sail by, more of them every year. So Redd has always known the property would fetch a good price from a developer, if she could stand to see it subdivided.

She didn't think she could.