Historian Wallace Stegner got it right when he wrote that “cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves” the West. Reminders of this surround us. Parents and children ride bikes at Lunch Loop on trails constructed by volunteers across land purchased through community fundraisers. Fruit-growers enter into conservation agreements with your local land trust, ensuring future harvests. Ranchers partner with the land trust to protect habitat that forms critical migration corridors for elk and mule deer. ...

By Sharon Sullivan

Steve Ela moved his Ela Family Farms to the North Fork Valley years ago after subdivisions were built on three sides of his family’s Grand Junction farm where his great-grandfather  rst planted an orchard in 1907. In 2003 and 2004, the Elas conserved their 100-acre Hotchkiss farm with the Black Canyon Regional Land Trust. ...