Home on the Range Heidi Redd trailing cattle at the Dugout Ranch. © Melissa Farlow
For more than a half century, Heidi Redd has worked to protect the Dugout Ranch—a 5,200-acre oasis on the southern edge of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. The ranch is also the largest private inholding in Bears Ears National Monument, and protects more than 353,000 acres of grazing allotments on surrounding federal lands.
In the 1990s, financial challenges forced the Redd family to look into selling the ranch, and developers rushed forward with plans to carve this one-of-a-kind landscape into vacation ranchettes, condos and golf courses. That’s when Heidi Redd turned to The Nature Conservancy.
The Nature Conservancy purchased the land, providing Redd a lifetime lease on her 25-acre homestead and forever protecting the ranch. But Redd’s conservation journey did not end there. As she reflects in this excerpt from her recently published, award-winning memoir, many of the challenges facing this historic landscape had just begun.
Excerpt from A Cowgirl’s Conservation Journey: Stories from the Dugout Ranch by Heidi Redd with Larisa Bowen
In The Nature Conservancy, I felt like I had found a partner powerful enough to hold the dam from breaking. Around me, pressures were mounting, threatening the land and our way of life. The Nature Conservancy’s 1997 purchase of the ranch created an instant buffer, one that became increasingly vital as I watched the region morph.
The Colorado Plateau was emerging on people’s radars as never before. With five of the country’s fastest-growing cities ringing the region, competing demands for resources—especially water and energy—escalated rapidly, as did tourism and recreation. Spanning mostly federal land, the plateau boasts some of America’s most popular parks and recreation areas. Millions of visitors began to flood this area each year to bike the slickrock, hike the twisting slot canyons, raft the white water and connect to a place of rare natural beauty.
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Get “A Cowgirl’s Conservation Journey”Of course, I understood the magnetic pull here. But I began to wonder how the region could support and balance the onslaught of these interests. I shuddered as I recalled a real estate agent sizing up the Dugout’s pastures.
On the morning of TNC’s celebration for the purchase of the Dugout, I floated on a cloud of relief. I remember riding my horse toward the big tent we’d set up near headquarters to welcome all the supporters and community guests. As I crossed the pasture, I gazed up at the Sundial and the Watchdog, the two singular red rock formations that hover over the ranch valley, poised like primordial guardians.
But as TNC staff and I would soon realize, the fight to save the Dugout was not over. The greatest threat was just emerging, and it would not be stopped by a property boundary.
As climate change began to crystallize in America’s consciousness, the Dugout slowly took on a new role—as a proving ground for scientists and ranchers studying climate impacts—and its fate became tied to the destiny of the entire Colorado Plateau.
For years, I’d ridden past the weather instruments set up by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on the grazing allotments [on federal lands] near ranch headquarters. They emerged from the pasture grass like lonely metal skeletons. I always wondered what the scientists were learning, and why they’d chosen that spot.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the Dugout lies along the southwestern monsoonal boundary, making it particularly sensitive to climatic variation. Scientists affiliated with government agencies had gathered decades of valuable data from those instruments, amassing a treasure trove of information and creating a powerful tool for anyone who wanted to understand what climate change would mean for the Colorado Plateau.
By 2008, reports were widespread that the American West had warmed 70% more than the planet as a whole, and that those of us here in the Colorado River Basin were in the bull’s-eye for future problems, including prolonged droughts and increasing heat. The unknowns were mounting. How would the region respond to climate change? How would the many different land uses here affect the resilience of our resources? How would ranchers survive? How should we adapt? Public land managers, communities, agricultural producers and lawmakers needed answers—and we needed some way to prepare or respond.
That’s where the Dugout came into play. TNC realized it had protected the perfect laboratory to study climate change and land use, right in the heart of the Colorado Plateau. In addition to being the site of more than 20 years of climate and weather data accrued by the USGS, the Dugout was a working ranch, with its own cattle herd, and it was situated next to more than 350,000 acres of public grazing allotments as well as the acres protected within Canyonlands National Park.
For decades, these public lands had been managed for different uses by the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. Some of the acres had been grazed or open to recreation, and some had little human impact, so scientists had ideal control sites for testing and comparison.
Dugout also had something even more important—people. Nobody builds bridges like TNC. Utah State Director Dave Livermore and conservation director Chris Montague, at TNC’s Utah Chapter helm in Salt Lake City, were joined by Sue Bellagamba, a vigorous, young conservationist who lived in Moab and was leading TNC’s work in the canyonlands region.
Dave, Chris and Sue worked hard to form positive relationships with the local field station managers and scientists at the agencies overseeing the public grazing allotments. They began to share data and brainstorm ideas. TNC also connected with professors and researchers, especially at Utah State University.
A group of us started meeting regularly at the Dugout, talking about the dire climate change predictions, soil and grass health, ranching, recreation and the region’s future. Everyone saw a crisis brewing on the plateau, and they also saw the potential of what we had: the right place, the right data and the right partners.
In 2010, TNC launched the Canyonlands Research Center, known as the CRC, with its base at the Dugout. The program’s founding partners were TNC, the USGS, the USDA Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, Utah State University and the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. TNC converted a portion of a Dugout barn into a lab and classroom space and built an open-air pavilion as well as a small tent cabin camp for visiting scientists.
The CRC’s research takes place in a unique outdoor laboratory where top scientists from around the world come here to study climate change, biological soil crusts, rangeland management, dryland vegetation ecology and more. The ideas, tools and strategies coming out of the CRC are meant to help ranchers, public land managers and communities in arid lands withstand climate change.
Truth be told, I get excited about a lot of the projects going on here.
One example is the large-scale restoration of bio-crust, which could impact the health of drylands worldwide. Known as a living “skin,” biocrusts are organisms on top of the soil that look like a craggy, charred carpet stretching between shrubs and grasses on the desert floor. This unassuming ground cover plays a vital role in the health of the entire desert ecosystem, benefiting soils, vegetation, and preventing the dust storms that contribute to air pollution.
The CRC’s reputation grew quickly. Amid the surge of new ideas and new people at the ranch, I recognized it was time for my role to shift. In 2015, I officially retired from running the cattle operation, and TNC hired my son, Matt, and his wife, Kristen. As project director for the CRC, Matt runs the Dugout ranch and cattle operation and directs the ranch’s coordination with the scientists. Kristen is the head of outreach and education programs at the CRC, and builds valuable collaborations with partners, students, local tribes, scientists and artists.
As heat and drought intensify, ranchers in the Southwest are the ones with skin in the game. They have serious motivations to safeguard the health of the lands that sustain their families, and most of them are also lifelong students of the ranching trade, eager to adapt and innovate.
Matt leads some of the CRC’s most interesting research initiatives. They’re using GPS collars and other technology to experiment with a new breed of cattle—the Raramuri Criollo. Descended from Spanish cattle first brought to Mexico centuries ago, Criollo are smaller than Red Angus and they are hardier—ranging farther for forage and able to travel long distances for water. Matt and his team are seeking important answers: Will the Criollo flourish here on the Colorado Plateau, and do they have a smaller environmental impact on the range? If scientists prove that they can and they do, ranchers in the Southwest could have a new powerful tool in the fight to remain in business as the climate shifts.
From the very start of the CRC, when I first began interacting with the scientists, I realized that ranchers like me and Matt can make valuable contributions to their research mission. There is a deep knowledge of this landscape stored in my brain and in my bones, one embedded over decades of riding the range, sleeping under the stars, and observing the life and natural patterns of this place. It’s a knowledge fueled by having to feed and sustain livestock year after year, relying on these grasses, moving through these canyons, tracking the rain and snowfall, and worrying about flows from the creeks. I know and see things in the Dugout country that the scientists, even with their sophisticated instruments, do not.
So I found, to my delight over the years, that the PhDs and I enjoyed learning from each other. And in the race against climate change, we truly need each other.
Quote: Heidi Redd
When I first began interacting with the scientists, I realized that ranchers like me can make valuable contributions to Canyonlands Research Center’s mission.
One night, maybe five years after the CRC had launched, I found myself sitting across the table from Nichole Barger. A University of Colorado professor and arid lands ecologist [and now deputy chief scientist at TNC], Nichole was directing the CRC’s research at the time. It was late, and Nichole was tired. She’d spent all day out on the range, working with her grad students to monitor the vegetation study plots they had erected.
We’d spent an hour talking about the changes I saw in the warm- and cool-season grass species, as she asked when and why I’d made certain management decisions over the years. It was the kind of conversation in which the common ground between us—scientist and rancher—was palpable.
As I handed her a cold bottle of Coke, she smiled gratefully. “I love that you are here, talking with us,” she said. “This is how science should always be done. How many of us get to work alongside someone who has observed and lived off the land for 50 years?”
I chuckled, but before I could respond, she leaned forward and nodded to a group of her young graduate students eating at a nearby table, two women and a man in their early twenties, T-shirts smeared with red dirt from their field work. Their laughter spiraled upwards, lifted on the evening breeze. “Seriously, Heidi, these kids spend an hour with you, and it forever changes their view of ranchers and their understanding of who cares about conservation and why.”
That night, crawling into bed, I gazed out my open window at the face of the Sundial rock formation, ghostly and solemn in the moonlight, and I thought about what Nichole said. All these years, I’d never questioned my calling. My heart and soul had been fulfilled by this land and by my work with the cattle.
Now, to my surprise, I had found a new purpose. My desperate fight to save the Dugout had led me to The Nature Conservancy, but its protection was just one step in the journey. The Dugout, TNC and I—and now my family and many other partners—are on a much longer road together, one fraught with greater perils than I’d ever imagined.
But as I pictured Nichole and her grad students at the CRC pavilion, and Matt working with scientists and running cattle, and Kristen meeting with tribal students, I smiled. Hope truly is about being part of something greater than yourself. And it’s about realizing that you are not alone. Climate change is here, and it is a grievous threat to all of us. But thanks to TNC and all the CRC partners, the Dugout and I are not complacent.
I will always be a cowgirl, but now I’m a cowgirl with a mission and a vision for leaving a legacy that matters not just to me or my family, but to ranchers and communities everywhere, eking out their livings across all the arid lands of this Earth.
Book Excerpt
Excerpted with edits from A Cowgirl’s Conservation Journey: Stories From the Dugout Ranch by Heidi Redd with Larisa Bowen. The book won the Western Writers of America 2025 Spur Award for Best Western new nonfiction.
To order a copy of the book, go to: nature.org/utahcowgirl.
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