Krista Langlois Posts

Straddling the Colorado-New Mexico border, where the broken peaks of the San Juan Mountains give way to the high desert’s windswept buttes and mesas, a 1.4 million acre expanse harbors some of the wildest land in the Southwest. The last grizzly in the Southern Rockies lurked unnoticed here for decades. Extirpated wolves and wolverines are still rumored to roam the backcountry. Re-introduced Canadian lynx prowl the deep snow beneath conifers. But this this unnamed region, stretching between Colorado’s Wolf Creek Pass and Abiquiú, New Mexico, isn’t pure wilderness. Right in the middle are 500,000 acres of privately owned land, surrounded by three national forests and the Jicarilla Apache reservation.