By Tracy Ross | Colorado Sun
Their hoofprints fan out in four directions but the elk that overwinter here have scattered. The snow is changing to ice and a brisk wind scours the ground. Maybe the gusts chased them off. Or a memory, stored deep in their DNA, of an elk caught in a barbed wire fence with a coyote eating it. That’s a slow, horrifying death, even though it’s just nature at work. Except it isn’t, says Dave Gottenborg, because of the fence.
Dave and his wife, Jean, bought the 3,000-acre Eagle Rock Ranch in Park County in 2012. But when they introduce themselves, they say they “manage” it.
That’s because Dave doesn’t like the idea of “owning” ground that’s been around millions of years longer than he has. In fact, he just worked with Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources on a biological survey of Eagle Rock, and when he saw himself listed as owner, he said, “it kind of made me wince a little bit, because we’re trying to get away from that, in the sense that we belong to the land rather than the other way around.”