The Movie Star
“We’re here about the future,” said Utah’s most famous transplant, Robert Redford. His sentiment was apt considering the occasion on the brisk October day in 1998 when he spoke those words while dedicating 860 acres at the base of Mount Timpanogos in Provo Canyon as the Redford Family Nature & Wildlife Preserve.
Redford was in his late teens when he first laid eyes on the near-pristine meadows, aspen stands and conifer forests that he’d eventually own and then preserve into perpetuity. He came upon that high-alpine Shangri-la in the mid-1950s by happenstance, as he took a wrong turn up the canyon while commuting between his parents’ home in Los Angeles and college in Boulder, Colo. In 1961, he purchased two acres in Provo Canyon where he built an A-frame cabin for his young family. Eight years later, Redford leveraged himself heavily to buy the canyon’s rickety ski resort, Timp Haven, renamed it Sundance, and pledged to “develop a little, conserve a great deal.” Over the ensuing years, Redford, his first wife, Lola Van Wagenen and three of their children—James, Shauna and Amy—would spend countless hours exploring every corner of the canyon, both together and alone, using the land as a refuge from the confines of Redford’s exponentially growing celebrity and learning resilience and self-reliance along the way. “Everything I needed to survive New York City I learned in that canyon,” says Redford’s youngest daughter, Amy. “I was a feral child. Most of the wisdom I have is a by-product of what I learned in these mountains.”
As Redford’s career grew, so did his commitment to protecting land and water for future generations. He was a founding board member of the National Resource Defense Council, rallied a group of environmental activists to, in 1976, successfully prevent the construction of a power plant in what is now the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and attempted to find common ground among politicians, environmentalists and scientists through multiple summits at Sundance, including his so-called “Greenhouse Glasnost,” held in 1989 long before most were aware of global warming’s inconvenient truth. And so, considering both his familial connection to Provo Canyon and his greater concerns for the planet, the Redford family’s 1998 decision to place almost 900 acres of their backyard into a conservation easement with Utah Open Lands does not seem that unexpected. What is extraordinary, however, is how Redford, along with a southern Utah cowgirl and a multigenerational Box Elder County ranching family, embraced what was then a new idea and helped spark a movement with one goal: leaving the land be.
The Cowgirl
In the early 1990s, a few years after she and her husband, Robert, ended their 23-year marriage, Heidi Redd heard a knock at the door. “It was a real estate agent from Jackson Hole hired by Robert to sell his half of the ranch,” Redd says. The ranch she is referring to is Dugout Ranch, 5,000-plus wild and scenic acres of red rock spires, desert grasslands and buttes located just south of Moab, bordered by Bears Ears National Monument, Indian Creek Recreation Area and the Manti-La Sal National Forest. “But I’m a cattle rancher, not a developer,” Redd says. “And I knew that if we divided the land that it would lose its heart and the only thing left to do then would be to develop it.” At the time, Redd sat on the board of the Canyonlands Field Institute. A fellow board member had recently worked with The Nature Conservancy of Utah (TNCU) to place his land in a conservation easement, and it occurred to Redd that perhaps that may be the way she could prevent Dugout from becoming Moab 2.0.
“A conservation easement is like a bundle of sticks,” explains Dave Livermore, longtime director of TNCU. “Lands placed under conservation easement with a land trust remain the property of the owner and can be sold like any other piece of land. But certain ‘sticks’—like building or mining rights—are no longer part of that bundle, preventing those uses as the land changes hands into perpetuity.” Owners of property placed in a conservation easement with a land trust are, of course, eligible for tax benefits like income tax deductions and estate tax credits, but those tax breaks rarely equate to a development cash-in. But money is, of course, not the point.
“Love for the land is, far and away, the biggest reason families put their land in a conservation easement,” says Wendy Fisher, founder and executive director of Utah’s oldest land trust, Utah Open Lands. “A farmer I know summed it up pretty succinctly: ‘Concrete is the last crop.’ Open space is truly the final frontier and it’s up to all of our collective graces to protect it.”
Redd’s initial conversations with TNCU evolved from placing the land under conservation easement to TNCU purchasing the land outright, with the commitment to maintain it as a working ranch and allow Redd to live there until her death. It took more than three years of negotiations with her ex-husband and other family members—“some friendly, some not so friendly,” Redd says—to bring everyone to a consensus. In 1997, almost eight years after her divorce, Redd entered into a union that, both then and now, many in Utah view as downright blasphemous: a partnership between a rancher and an environmental organization.
In 2009, TNCU deepened its commitment to Dugout with the establishment of the Canyonlands Research Center. There, scientists from around the world study the intersection between climate change and land use, including how conservation and cattle ranching can coexist. Around 2015, Redd sold both her cattle herd and grazing rights to more than 300,000 acres, abutting Dugout to TNCU as well. Redd’s son and daughter-in-law, Matt and Kristen, now manage the herd at Dugout, which now includes the ranch’s original Red Angus cows as well as Mexican Criollo cows that are smaller, lighter and able to graze farther from water.
Regardless of what her peers or local lawmakers might think, Redd has no regrets about her decision to sell her land to TNCU. “The ranch is running half as many cattle now as when I was running it, which was half as many as when my ex-husband and I were running it together. 25 years ago, very few of us talked about climate change. You just can’t run the same number of cows here that you once could. And I will not sacrifice this landscape for cattle,” she says.
The Rancher
“My property is not Dugout,” explains Jay Tanner, describing his sprawling Della Ranch, 17,000 acres of sagebrush and open skies located northwest of the Great Salt Lake in the Grouse Creek Valley, where his family has run cattle since the 1870s. No real estate agents have called upon Tanner—Della Ranch’s acute remoteness has seen to that—but over the years Tanner had observed how juniper trees were becoming more and more prevalent on his family’s land. “They probably got a foothold with the arrival of white settlers,” Tanner says. The trees were sucking water from the grasses he depends on to support his herd. And, as revealed by a Utah State University study, the juniper trees had drastically diminished the grassland’s previously robust greater sage-grouse populations. “This is home,” Tanner says. “We know we need to take care of it if it’s going to continue to be able to take care of us.” And so, the Tanner family, along with a few neighboring ranchers, partnered with TNCU and National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to improve more than 9,000 acres of greater sage-grouse habitat on their properties. Almost immediately, Tanner noticed more greater sage-grouse on his ranch; more elk, antelope, mountain lions, coyotes and other species followed. And yes, the grasses and forage flourished for his cows, too. “What’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” Tanner says.
In 2017, the Tanners doubled down on their land conservation efforts by placing 7,000 acres of Della Ranch in a conservation easement, allowing a huge swath of the range to remain forever uninterrupted by homes or roads. The Tanner family was compensated for the easement by TNCU, NRCS and Utah’s LeRay McAllister Critical Land Conservation Fund, but again, at a fraction of what the payout would have been if he’d sold to a developer. “There’s no question that I had a financial interest in it,” Tanner says. “It helped us reduce our debt load and expand into other areas. But we also did it out of concern for the future. Maybe 100 years from now, people smarter than me will have a different opinion, but now I know this land will always be as it is right now. And as we expand, this will not be the last easement we do.”
The Movement
Whether or not the actions taken by the Redfords, Redds and Tanners have turned hearts and minds in Utah toward land conservation is speculative. But there’s no question that both the public and government are recognizing the value in keeping land open. “Conservation was such a novel idea in the 1990s,” Fisher says. “But there’s emerged a very clear pace of landscapes being lost. The conversation started then about how we can balance open space and development to protect why Utah is so appealing in the first place.”
This article was originally a feature in the May/June 2022 issue of Salt Lake. Subscribe to get more Salt Lake right to your mailbox. Read more stories like this and all of our Community coverage. And while you’re here, subscribe and get six issues of Salt Lake magazine, your curated guide to the best of life in Utah.
