Steamboat Rock Ranch - Colorado, Larimer County, Livermore

Steamboat Rock Ranch has historically been used as cattle grazing land. There is one active spring and no surface water rights. No agricultural improvements are present on the property and the perimeter boundary is partially fenced.

Steamboat Rock Ranch lies in the middle of the 400,000-acre Laramie Foothills “Mountains to Plains” Project, a collaborative land protection effort between willing private ranchland owners, Larimer County, the City of Fort Collins, The Nature Conservancy, Legacy Land Trust, and Great Outdoors Colorado, to conserve the biologically rich transition zone that stretches from shortgrass prairie in the east to alpine mountains on the west. Mirr Ranch Group also participates in this partnership, likely one of the very few private real estate firms in the country to serve in such a capacity.

Back in the mid 1990s, The Nature Conservancy decided that the Laramie Foothills, a 22-by-25-mile block of land, was a top conservation priority. More than 70 percent of this landscape is privately owned, predominated by a few remaining ranch families, and nearly all of it threatened from fragmentation occurring from new subdivisions rising to the south. Thus far, the partners’ land protection efforts in this ecologically and culturally magnificent landscape have protected over 55,000 acres.

Steamboat Rock Ranch benefits from this project since ranchlands that lie at its southern and western boundaries are protected forever by a conservation easement (download “Laramie Foothills Protected Lands” map). Steamboat Rock Ranch shares many of the ecological qualities of the Laramie Foothills lands already protected, so it can qualify if a future landowner is inclined to work with the project partners to preserve it. As illustrated by the map, if Steamboat Rock Ranch were to be protected it would be part of an unbroken, sprawling, landscape-level of protected lands acreage.

In Colorado, significant financial benefits can be received by applying a conservation easement to one’s land. Contact Tommy Latousek for more information.