Map More Info

It starts shortly after you pass the teepee on the bluff to your right: tract houses, ranks of them, so perfectly cloned and characterless that if pranksters switched all the address numbers it would wreak community-wide havoc. Then you drive by Young’s Farm, for decades a thriving family-run operation that produced corn, pumpkins, chickens and turkeys. It now lies deserted, bare and windscoured, awaiting a subdivided fate.

Soon you’re into Prescott Valley, a municipality apparently incorporated as homage to the strip mall. Every chain and franchise known to man is here: fast food restaurants, tire stores, super centers, factory outlets. Miles of them, with traffic lights timed to ensure you stop regularly and don’t miss one.

At last you reach the beleaguered, historic town of Prescott. The old town square is a breath of fresh air, with its tall trees, ice cream shops, book stores and the legendary Palace Restaurant and Saloon, which dates from 1877 (and is the sole survivor of the 39 saloons that once faced “Whiskey Row”). But the square is the calm eye in a hurricane of frenzied development.

Betty Wells remembers when there was no hurricane, nor even a cloud on the horizon.

Betty’s parents, Claud Aiken and Hazel Swiger, moved to Chino Valley, about 15 miles north of Prescott, in 1910, when Arizona was still a territory. In 1930, with their 7-year-old daughter in tow, they homesteaded a property that would be called Little Thumb Butte Ranch after a nearby 5,168-foot peak. Over the years, Betty’s father bought up more and more land, as the Depression forced many adjacent homesteaders to sell for as little as 50 cents per acre. Eventually the deeded property of the ranch surpassed 3,000 acres.

Although Claud and Hazel were early settlers, they weren’t the first to work the Little Thumb Butte country: a couple of corrals on the property predate 1900, and no one remembers who built them. Even those nameless pioneers, of course, were latecomers. Betty has a collection of stone arrowheads gathered over a lifetime of roaming the ranch, and a rocky ravine near the headquarters hides a scattering of pictographs. Most enigmatic of all, high on Little Thumb Butte itself, is a partially collapsed stone parapet, complete with loopholes for defense, which locals assume was erected by Indians in anticipation of some long-forgotten siege.

	At age 7, Betty Wells moved with her family to the Little Thumb Ranch in 1930. She’s now 84, and along with her husband Billy, 82, still runs cattle on the ranch, now forever protected from development. (Franz and Renate Rosenberger)

In 1958 Claud died, and in 1971 Hazel—the last living homesteader in the Chino Valley—followed him, leaving the ranch to Betty and her husband William (or Billy, as he’s known to everyone). For the next 30 years, the Wells ran the ranch as a typical western cow-calf operation, persevering through droughts, market slumps and the occasional cow-loving cougar.

By the turn of the millennium, it was apparent that the sleepy nature of the Prescott area was changing. Prescott itself was growing, Prescott Valley was beginning to metastasize, and signs advertising that most humiliating of all fates for ranchland—5, 10 and 20-acre “ranchettes”—were creeping up Highway 89 toward Chino Valley.

The Wells were determined to avoid a similar end and keep Little Thumb Butte Ranch a working endeavor. They occupied an enviable position, bordered on the east by the Prescott National Forest and on the north by state land and the Verde River Wildlife Area. But as such, the ranch would be prime real estate as the boom fingered its way north. Land prices would skyrocket, and Betty and Billy’s heirs would face a massive estate tax, undoubtedly enough to force the sale of some or all of the property, given the marginal income afforded by ranching in central Arizona.

With the help of ranch law attorney Christopher Kottke of Prescott, a family friend who had been advising the Wells on estate and business matters, they arrived at a perfect solution: a donated conservation easement, which would preserve the land and habitat in perpetuity, retain the rights of the Wells and their heirs to graze cattle and continue other compatible uses on the land, avoid a large chunk of estate tax, and realize immediate income tax reductions.

Although conservation easements have been around for well over a century, only in the last 30 years or so have they emerged as a powerful tool through which private landowners can preserve their legacy while gaining tax benefits that at least partially offset the reduced market value of land forever closed to development. Once the Wells had decided on this course, they had to determine how much land to set aside in the easement, how much to exclude, and where their houses, other buildings and incompatible business operations needed space. In the end, the acreage of the easement amounted to 2,440, more than two-thirds of their deeded land.

	A stone parapet perches as it has for centuries, complete with loopholes for defense. A new conservation easement will provide the ranch with further defense against the sprawling subdivisions that continue to march into the area from the nearby community of Prescott. (Franz and Renate Rosenberger)

In the end, Chris Kottke told me, the choice was straightforward. “The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation worked the hardest for us, and they were the group we felt was always up front and completely honest about their goals. The Wells were happy to offer them the donation of this conservation easement, the first for RMEF in Arizona.”

Billy added, “We really liked the folks at the Elk Foundation. This has been a working ranch for a long, long time, and we wanted it to stay that way. They made that happen.”

Ron Pittman, Arizona regional director for the Elk Foundation, returned the gratitude. “Thanks to this generous and far-sighted donation by the Wells, an important piece of Arizona habitat will be protected forever. The Little Thumb Butte easement provides excellent year-round forage for mule deer and pronghorn, and good winter grazing for elk, especially when snowfall is as abundant as it was this past season.”

Angie Lohse, Land Resources program manager for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, agreed. “This easement, combined with a previous easement donated by the Wells along the Verde River, strengthens their legacy and expands an important habitat buffer zone adjacent to public land.”

On a sunny May morning, Betty and Billy gave me the tour in their well-used Tahoe, with Chris along for the ride. After leaving the sprawling ranch headquarters, peppered with retired machinery, the road wound past a small gravel pit operation on a different part of the Wells’s land, leased to an outside firm. Then we took a 4x4 trail east and up into the hills of the easement. Signs of human use fell away, and almost immediately two pronghorns trotted out of a nearby ravine and angled over a ridge, in no particular hurry. When we stopped to look over the terrain, I spotted mule deer droppings on a narrow game trail. Winter rains in the area had been good, and wildflowers were out in abundance: mallow, desert marigold, four-o’clocks, Indian paintbrush and verbena. The hillsides were thick with blooming cliff rose.

At one spot along the route, Chris shared an anecdote from one of the tours given to the ambassadors from an unnamed conservation organization. Billy had spotted a good-sized rattlesnake in the road and stopped the vehicle. The ambassadors climbed out and oohed and ahhed at the snake from a safe distance, while Billy wandered off through the brush. Betty quickly realized what he was doing: looking for a good-sized rock. Billy is a rancher of the traditional school regarding rattlesnakes. Betty managed to catch his eye and shake her head, and Billy broke a longstanding tradition, “Just that once,” he said with a twinkle.

We stopped near two windmills, and Billy, with the spryness of a man 30, heck, 40 years his junior, climbed over a tank to yank on a piece of plumbing that was out of whack. As we chatted and hiked around at various vantage points, it was simply impossible for me to remember that these were two people well into their 80s. One switchback Billy drove us down took a 30-degree plunge around a scree-covered corner, on which the Tahoe slithered and fishtailed on the brink of a precipitous slope. Chris, in the back seat next to me, said through gritted teeth, “I usually just close my eyes at this spot.” Billy simply continued chatting while he one-handed the Tahoe as though negotiating a feed-store parking lot.

Late that afternoon I went back on my own and climbed Little Thumb Butte to get a look at the wall I’d been told about. On the way up, a juvenile Arizona black rattlesnake—not yet attired in his adult black—let me know this was his country, with a rampant coil and a tiny buzz from his button rattle. Apparently Billy hasn’t had too much effect on the Crotalus population hereabouts.

In slanting sunlight I topped out on the peak, wondering what motivated an unknown people to build the impressive stone fortification guarding the only easy approach. From behind the wall I could look south across the valley and see the glint of housing developments. It suddenly seemed fitting that this mysterious wall should now crown the Thumb Butte Ranch conservation easement as a symbol of a new defense—one that will protect this land for wildlife and for the enjoyment of many future generations.