Storm's Coming

by Peggy Kahan

Title

Storm's Coming

Artist

Peggy Kahan

Medium

Photograph - Photography, Digital Photography

Description

This barn is one of many abandoned buildings on Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico. The history of the Park dates from a land grant in 1841, through various owners who added more acreage and built the land into a guest and cattle ranch. A group of early investors included Douglas Fairbanks, Henry Firestone and Herbert Hoover who held the property until the group disbanded during the Great Depression. At that point, the ranch included elaborate ranch houses, 6,000 head of cattle, trout fishing lakes and a reintroduction of elk.
Pennzoil Company bought Vermejo Park in 1973 and continued the park￿s operation as a guest and cattle ranch. In 1996, Ted Turner acquired Vermejo Park. It remains the largest of his land holdings and is the largest tract of privately owned property in the West. Turner sold the cattle herd, stocked the ranges with bison and the lakes with trout and established a philosophy of land management and conservation that is self-sustaining and retains the original inhabitants and surroundings as much as possible.
Today, Vermejo Park Ranch offers nature tourism, fishing and hunting for elk, bear, deer bison and turkey. Staff works with the US Fish and Wildlife to reintroduce former species such as the black-footed ferret, rocky mountain bighorn sheep and, eventually, wolves.
Numerous abandoned barns, ranch houses and even a ghost town are being left to slowly revert back to the grassland, prairie and forests of the ranch.

Uploaded

January 2nd, 2014

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