The Mountain-Ear

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A mountain ranch full of history - the Trevarton Ranch PDF Print E-mail
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Wednesday, 21 October 2009
Gene Mackey
ALLENSPARK

    Before the turn of the twentieth century, ranchers replaced the trappers in the Colorado Mountains. Today there are few of these mountain ranches left on the Front Range but there is one outside Allenspark -- the Trevarton Ranch -- where life is much the same as it was one hundred years ago. Being five miles back on a rough dirt road, modern conveniences always came hard on the ranch. Phil and Lillian Trevarton, who operated the ranch in the 1960s, had a power plant for electricity and eventually bought a generator. Their grandson, Gary Williams, who now operates the ranch, uses solar panels for electricity. He also has a phone, thanks to an expensive satellite phone. Often phone calls are saved until he can take a trip to his grandma’s house four miles away.
    Life for Gary isn’t that much different than when the ranch was bought by Lillian’s uncle, Edwin Boinay, in the early 1900s. Boinay had dairy cows and sold milk, beef, pork, poultry, and garden vegetables to the local market. Milk was bottled at the ranch and cooled in wire cages in the streams, or with ice cut from Copeland Lake. Their large log barn was built as a dairy barn around this time. This one-hundred-year-old structure was built with logs skidded from the forest and was renovated in the 1990s thanks to money from a conservancy easement on the ranch. The structure won the Colorado Barn Again award in 1999 and is a showcase for Boulder County’s historic structures.
    Today Gary still runs cattle, boards horses and cuts hay. This past year he cut over four thousand bales of hay, well over the average of 3000 in a drier year. He sells some firewood and cuts boards on his sawmill to round out his income. Much of his equipment is old but he prides himself on his thriftiness and his ingenuity.
    To while away his spare time Gary writes a column for the local newspaper, the Allenspark Wind, called Ranch Tales. In it he describes life on a mountain ranch from the routine to the extraordinary. He tells about how the ditches were made in the hay fields that carry the life giving water in the spring, the only water except for rain. The old timers cut the ditches with a tractor, ingeniously choosing its course with a twenty-foot board with a 3’ 2x4 leg on one end and another 2x4 leg on the other measuring 3’ 1”. This clever apparatus was used to plot the course of the ditch, follow the lay of the land to keep water flowing but maintaining elevation across the field. He tells the story of a dance held there around 1920 with people coming from miles around packing their fancy dress clothes on horses and dancing through the night, then taking the long ride home at daylight the next day. Many of his columns have been reprinted in a book “Ranch Tales, Essays of a Mountain Rancher,” available from the Allenspark Wind.
    To Gary its all part of life. “I guess I’m like a dinosaur,” he says.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 04 November 2009 )
 
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