The number of Colorado apple orchards is growing again

By Eric Peterson

A century ago, the apple boom was in full swing in Montezuma County.

The home of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado had a high enough elevation and dispersed enough orchards to stave off the codling moth that decimated apple trees on the Front Range and Western Colorado in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

At the peak, there were about 5,000 acres of orchards in Montezuma County, producing several million bushels of apples a year. As of the early 2000s, the county’s apple acreage had dwindled to a little more than 100.

Orchard Social Scheduled
Held on Oct. 14, MORP’s annual Orchard Social features a tree sale as well as music, food and cider tasting. It also shines a spotlight on the Colorado Orange apple, a cultivar thought to be extinct until the Schuenemeyers rediscovered it in 2017.

In the years between, Washington state took over as the nation’s apple powerhouse, and many of Montezuma County’s orchards were abandoned. Some, like Bill Russell’s 10-acre orchard at his home in Lebanon, just west of Dolores, are still producing.

As the founder of Mountain Sun Juice, he latched onto the county’s apple-growing legacy in the early 1970s before opening a juice factory in Dolores in 1981. “Back in the ‘70s, there were a lot of orchards, probably 10 times as many as there are now,” said Russell, who sold the since-shuttered Mountain Sun in 2000.

The growth of hard cider is catalyzing a reversal of fortune, because the elevation makes for a more acidic fruit that cider makers covet. “They get sweet, but they have acid in them,” Russell said. “Apples grown at a lower elevation, especially Red Delicious, they get sweet, but they don’t have any acid.”

Russell credited Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer, the founders of the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project (MORP), for “sparking the interest” of locals. “It’s got some legs again,” he said.

The married couple transitioned from wildland firefighting to running a nursery in Cortez in the early 2000s. The Schuenemeyers quickly learned about the rich apple history in Montezuma County. “We realized a lot of what was on the county fair records didn’t exist anymore,” Jude said.

Established in 2008, MORP grew out of that epiphany. “Our mission is to preserve Colorado’s fruit-growing heritage and restore the orchard culture and economy in the southwest region,” Jude said. “We want to preserve every old cultivar that we can find here or that we know grew here.”

That’s about 500 different kinds of apples. “Of that number, half of those are considered extinct now,” Jude said. “There are some we’ve lost completely, and we hate that.”

Jude estimated there are now about 10,000 old trees in the county. “The orchards are filled with these rare cultivars, because we do tree-by-tree mapping of old orchards and we’ve been able to do a lot of DNA studies on cultivars we find. We’ve come up with 100 or 150 rare cultivars, some of them so rare they’re the last tree or last couple trees left around, a lot of which we don’t know what they are.”

To preserve the local legacy, MORP’s 36-acre Orchard Hub has six acres with about 100 rare cultivars. “Hopefully in the next year or two, we can get another eight acres planted. It’s just getting funding,” Jude said. MORP also owns a mobile juice press to help orchard owners like Rick Goodall monetize their crop.

A third-generation apple grower, Goodall now has five sons who help him with the harvest at his 20-acre Bountiful Ridge Farm in Arriola. “I was raised in an orchard, so I’ve been in the fruit business all my life,” Goodall said. “My grandfather moved here in the early 1900s and started planting trees when the irrigation developed, then my dad picked up on it.”

Things got tough in the ‘70s as Washington state’s industry boomed. “They had the new varieties, the Red Delicious,” Goodall said. “We had the old varieties, and those just weren’t very popular with the grocery stores.”

Montezuma County’s apple economy withered in the face of the Red Delicious onslaught. Packing lines and co-ops shut down, and many farms converted orchards to alfalfa fields, which are less labor-intensive but need much more water.

Due to the difficulty of picking 30-foot-tall giants, Goodall is planting trellised trees to ease his labor needs at Bountiful Ridge. In his mind, it’s the right time to invest in modernization. “I can see a rebound in the apple industry,” he said. “We really need to jump on this and make it something bigger.”

Both Goodall and Russell sell apples to a pair of Montezuma County cideries, Fenceline Cider in Mancos and EsoTerra Ciderworks in Dolores.

The husband-and-wife team of Jared Scott and Elizabeth Philbrick founded EsoTerra, which began operating out of the old Mountain Sun facility in 2019. They opened a Durango tasting room in 2023.

About five years before the launch, Jared would go running all over Montezuma County and noticed a bounty of apples rotting on the ground. That planted the seed for EsoTerra.

EsoTerra uses only apples — and no sugar or other flavors — in its artisanal ciders. Its recipes feature uncommon varietals like Snow White crabapples and red-fleshed Mountain Rose apples, and most of the fruit is local. “We handpick apples from over 50 different landowners,” Philbrick said.

While many orchards have met the business end of a bulldozer in recent years, the EsoTerra team, along with MORP and others, have helped plant about 3,000 new trees in the last few years. Scott and Philbrick are also personally planting trees on a 70-acre property they recently bought.

“We’re now close to doubling the amount of trees in these two counties [Montezuma and La Plata], and what’s going to happen is there’s going to be a glut of fruit,” Philbrick said. “It takes five to 15 years to get fruit off those trees, so this is not increasing our industry today. This is a promise for the future.”

Her lofty goal? “I want us to be the Napa Valley of cideries.”

Eric Peterson is a freelance writer based in Denver. His website is rambleguides.com.