Sangre de Cristo is Spanish for “blood of Christ.” Running southeast from Colorado into northern New Mexico is the southernmost range of the Rockies, the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The name derives from the blood red color of the mountains at sunrise and sunset, particularly when the peaks are covered in snow. It is a magnificent range of mountains with many “fourteeners,” or peaks over 14,000 feet, offering some of the most spectacular wilderness still left in the lower forty-eight states.

Vermejo Park Ranch is the largest landholding of the largest landholder in the world, Ted Turner, and encompasses over 588,000 acres of wilderness in the northern New Mexico portion of the Sangre de Cristo range. Vermejo Park is the heart of the famous two-million acre Maxwell Land Grant, which was created in 1841 and named after Lucien Maxwell, a fur trader colleague of Kit Carson. Over the years various owners acquired and managed the property, including a group of businessmen in the 1920s who turned it into a private club, with members including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, as well as business and political titans Harvey Firestone and Herbert Hoover.

Ted Turner is committed to returning the ranch to its ecological origins through a variety of ambitious projects including the reintroduction of the prairie dog, the black-footed ferret, the American bison, and sustainable wolf populations. The ranch also has thriving populations of black bear, coyotes, and even mountain lions. Vermejo is home to one of the last bastions of the Rio Grande cutthroat trout and their habitat is actively being expanded and protected. Over sixty percent of the land is Ponderosa Pine forest and through the use of select cutting and the controlled burning of over 20,000 acres a year, Vermejo is returning this ecosystem to a state not seen since the arrival of the first Europeans.

In returning this ranch to its original ecological state, the hunting and fishing is returning as well. Twenty-one lakes and more than thirty miles of pristine streams offer anglers the opportunity to fish for big browns, rainbows, native brook trout, and the Rio Grande cutthroat in their natural environment. Hunters can pursue elk, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, turkey, and even bison. Given the vastness of the ranch, there are distinct ecosystems, from the alpine tundra of the west side, to the high prairie grasslands on the east side of the range.

Very rarely can a single landholding this large be found. Even rarer is a commitment from the owner to spend the resources necessary to bring it back to its original state and offer it to the discerning sportsman. The Vermejo Park Ranch is unquestionably a must for any sportsman who wants to experience the great southwest as it was long before the incursion of the Anglo/Europeans.