Open Range & the Ranching Country — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
You'll have noticed the cattle guards — those steel grids across the road — and possibly some cattle standing in the road as though they own it. In legal terms, out here, they very nearly do.
Much of this is OPEN RANGE, which reverses the assumption most drivers carry. It is not the rancher's job to fence cattle off the road; it is the landowner's job to fence them out. If you hit a cow on open range, you may well be liable for the animal. So: slow down through the grid, and treat a black cow on a dark road the way you'd treat an elk.
Ranching here runs on grazing allotments — permits to run a certain number of animals on national forest for part of the year. Families have held some of these allotments for over a century, moving cattle up to the high meadows for summer and down to lower country for winter, which is the same seasonal rhythm that has worked in mountain country everywhere for thousands of years.
It's also the source of the most persistent conflict in this landscape — over grass, over water, over predators, and above all over wolves. When we talk about the Mexican wolf reintroduction, remember that for the people who live down in that country, it isn't an abstraction. It's their calves.