The Vermejo Park Ranch was the ultimate getaway for the rich and famous long before Robin Leach coined the phrase.
Mary Pickford stayed there. A lakeside bungalow, "Mary's Cabin," is named for her.Other visitors during the 1920s to this Sangre De Cristo mountains hideaway included Herbert Hoover, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Andrew Mellon and Harvey Firestone.
In June, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda agreed to buy the 578,000-acre ranch from its most recent owner, Pennzoil, at an undisclosed price. Several corporate entities, Pennzoil among them, retain subsurface mineral rights.
The purchase makes Turner the single largest private landowner in New Mexico, bringing his holdings to 1.2 million acres - 1,875 square miles. Turner already owns the Armendaris and Ladder ranches near Truth or Consequences.
Turner plans to continue the ranch's current operation: as a magnet for well-heeled guests who have gone there for most of this century to hunt trophy elk, bears and mountain lions. Fly-fishers angle for cutthroat, rainbow and brook trout.
Visitors to the ranch typically arrive by private aircraft at Raton's Crews Field, the nearest airport, 40 miles away. They are met by a van and driven to the ranch.
"It's funny when you see them arriving in their Learjets and boarding the bus, they're all yakking about the price of oil," says Candice Conner, a former ranch co-manager.
"Then you see them on the bus on the ride back to the airport, and they're all silent, looking out over the landscape with new appreciation for the beauty of the place," she said.
Although rustic - there is only one big-screen TV in a common area and no telephones in guest rooms - Vermejo Ranch is not without amenities. New menus are printed daily, and five or six gourmet entrees are offered - walnut-crusted lamb chops, for example.
A staff of up to 60 people is on hand to serve up to 60 guests, either at the main guest compound 7,500 feet above sea level, or at two remote lodges at 8,500 and 10,000 feet, respectively.
Also on staff are people to teach horseback riding, skeet shooting and fly-fishing. A fish cleaner is on duty noon to 9 p.m. daily to clean, ice and package trout for the trip home.
Over the years, Vermejo Park Ranch has amassed a fortune's worth of antiques. In the 93-year-old stone main building of the ranch, a golden hawk commands the space above the mantle. Also found in the main house is an Oriental rug reputed to be worth $1 million. The main room features 12-foot-high mirrors that were entrained to Raton in 1902-04 and carried undamaged by wagon to the ranch.
Oddest antique item: an elaborate hashish pipe, a rogue remnant of the wild days in the Roaring '20s, when the ranch was frequented by the Vermejo Hunt Club, a group of fast-living Hollywood stars, politicians and business tycoons.
But the real beauty of this gated and fenced private reserve is the landscape itself.
Most of the ranch sprawls across a wrinkled carpet of rolling pinon-forested hills. From the air, the hills resemble a deep green shoreline descending to meet a giant brown sea, the Great Plains, which stretches to the east as far as the eye can see.
The ranch boasts an elk herd of 5,000, the largest in New Mexico, as well as deer, antelope and wild turkey. Some 25,000 trout are stocked each year in 15 lakes and 25 miles of streams.
Fly-fishing costs $300 a day, which includes room and board. A weeklong elk hunt costs up to $12,000. Hunters are assigned sections of land and guaranteed that no other hunters will trespass on their area.
Eighty-five percent of hunters on the ranch get an elk; it's said the only reason they don't is that they couldn't find one bigger than the one they got the year before.
Environmentalists believe the Vermejo Park Ranch will probably be the last large privately owned property to be sold intact this century.
The ranch was part of the 1.7 million-acre Maxwell Land Grant in 1841. Like so many other large tracts in New Mexico, it was purchased by an English syndicate for mineral and timber investment purposes in 1867. Twenty years later, it was broken up into several parts.
In 1902, William Bartlett, a Chicago grain speculator, bought a 205,000-acre parcel, the first of two large purchases that now make up the ranch. In 1911, he imported elk from Wyoming, re-establishing the species after it had been wiped out in New Mexico by overhunting in the early 1890s.
In 1926, the ranch was sold to a Los Angeles business syndicate, which formed the elite, invitation-only Vermejo Hunt Club. Lifetime membership: $5,000.
During the Depression, however, the Vermejo Hunt Club was disbanded and the ranch land was leased for cattle operations. Things remained dormant there until 1948, when Fort Worth, Texas, businessman W.J. Gourley bought the ranch and resumed big-game hunting and trout fishing.
The state of New Mexico passed up the chance to buy the ranch in 1973 for $26 million, and Pennzoil took it over.
In 1982, Pennzoil donated 100,000 acres of the ranch to the U.S. Forest Service, netting a $26 million tax credit, enough to recoup the company's original investment of $28 million.