Video: Hunter Access on the X-One Ranch

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168,000 acres, or about 260 square miles, is a lot of land, and these are the ranchers who take care of it.

My name is Beatrice Zueger-Lange. We are on the X Bar One Ranch, which is an old working cattle ranch.

Her husband is Charles Lange.

I want to add that my husband is one of those four or five generation ranchers here in Arizona. I'm not. I was born in Switzerland. We have extremely good wildlife: deer, elk, antelope, javelinas. We have lots of birds.

There used to never be any quail up here, but ever since we started cutting all the trees, the quail have multiplied.

By removing invasive juniper trees, they're improving the health of this grassland habitat.

We just love it. We love to take care of the land. It's never ending, and they have big lists of things that we need to do, so it never gets boring.

And big lists of things that never get done. [LAUGHS]

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It's just a lot of long days and a lot of hard work and a lot of all types of work, I mean, as far as fixing fence, cleaning dirt tanks, putting in, keeping the waters up.

Water from deep wells is pumped through miles of pipeline into drinkers spread across the ranch.

It's all good for wildlife because the wildlife wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the water. [LAUGHS]

The X Bar One Ranch is located between Kingman and Seligman.

It's a cow calf operation. We have black Angus commercial cows and purebred black Angus registered bulls. And that's in two counties. It's in Yavapai and Mojave County. It's a third state, a third BLM, and the other third is private.

The Langes do not allow open access to hunters on their private land.

We like to have control over who's on the private property.

That's partially because the Langes are in the food business.

For us, biosecurity is extremely important.

The property is posted, but Charles says some people drive right past the signs or even take them down.

I've caught so many people over the years, and so that's my biggest beef with the hunters.

The X Bar One does offer guided hunts for a fee, and it makes special allowances for a neighbor who works with disabled veterans.

And he helps them. They all do that for free, and we allow them to hunt anywhere on us on the private property.

The Langes stopped allowing open access years ago, partially due to concerns about liability and lawsuits, but mostly because it created a lot of extra work and cost a lot of extra money, like when hunters clean their quail or clean themselves in water troughs and dirt tanks.

For example, just to clean one dirt tank can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000.

Easy.

When you're in the food business, clean water is critical. When you're a rancher, so are good roads.

And it's a lot of wear and tear on the trucks and the equipment when you have to drive around on really bad roads. So we try to keep our roads maintained to keep our costs down for maintenance and stuff. And when there's a hunting season going on, hunters have almost all of them have absolutely no respect for the roads and stuff. If it's raining and muddy, they'll go anyway, and they don't care. And I don't know if they just don't care, or they just don't think about anything except what they're doing at the moment.

People who don't show much respect for the ranch cause a lot of problems for the Langes, even the ones who hunt on the state and BLM portions of the ranch.

If they go to retrieve an animal, they just see a fence there and they think oh, I'll just cut the fence. So they cut it, and then sometimes if they're good, they'll try to put it back or put it back up. And if they're not, they won't even try to put it back. Well, then the cattle get out on the neighbors and it's just-- it probably cost us an extra at least $5,000 to $10,000 a year because of all the extra work we have to do.

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We have a lot of stories we could tell you, but I don't think that makes a lot of sense. So we would like to look forward, and we would like to help somehow to educate people.

The Lange's message is simple.

Just to be respectful of our ranch and of our property.

Just to be mindful and to remember that it's our business.

They hope this video will get people to think about how their actions might impact the ranch.

Most hunters are good. Most of them are respectful, and most of them treat things with respect. There's always going to be a few. Probably not even a video like this is going to do anything for those kind, but for someone that wants to learn and wants to know how they can help or what they can do different, then it's going to be good.

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