For years, if you wanted to see a bison near Highlands Ranch, you drove Daniels Park Road, pulled off near the old Shelter House, and looked west across the fence line. The herd stayed on its side. That boundary had held for more than a century, and most residents who've lived here a while could have told you exactly where it was without ever having read a map.
Sometime in June 2026, that boundary moved. For the first time in more than 150 years, bison from the historic Daniels Park herd started grazing on land inside the Highlands Ranch Backcountry Wilderness Area itself, the same conservation acreage that runs behind neighborhoods like BackCountry, Firelight, and Wildcat Ridge. Not the county park next door. The land Highlands Ranch Community Association actually owns and manages, the ridge a lot of residents have walked, biked, or driven past for years assuming it held nothing but grass, deer, and the occasional elk.
What Actually Happened This Summer
The move was the product of a three-way conservation partnership between HRCA's Backcountry Wilderness Area Fund, Denver Mountain Parks, and the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance, with Colorado State University's veterinary program and the neighboring Sanctuary Golf Course pitching in on water access. The Daniels Park herd typically runs between 24 and 40 animals depending on how many calves are born in a given year, and roughly 30 of them now have access to a newly prepared pasture inside the Backcountry. Reported acreage for that new pasture varies by outlet, somewhere between 150 and 200 acres depending on which release you read, but the direction is the same either way: more range, on land that hasn't held a bison since well before Highlands Ranch existed as a place name.
None of it cost HRCA anything directly. The Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance wrote and secured the grant that paid for the new fencing on the eastern and western edges of the property. Mark Giebel, who directs the Backcountry Wilderness Area for HRCA, put the ecological logic simply:
"Bison grazing patterns can increase plant diversity and create habitat variation."
Built to Keep Bison In, Not Everything Else Out
The fencing itself is worth pausing on, because it's not a standard ranch fence. It was engineered to hold bison inside the new pasture while still letting elk, black bears, and mountain lions pass through freely, the same animals that already move across the Backcountry on a regular basis. That's a harder design problem than it sounds, and it's the reason the project took a few years of planning before the gates actually opened this summer.
The Collars Doing the Real Work
The bison moving into this new ground aren't just being released and left alone. Before the herd could cross over, Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance's field conservation and veterinary teams joined Denver Mountain Parks, Colorado State University, and members of the TallBull family for two immobilization days at Daniels Park. Male bison were fitted with both GPS collars and solar-powered ear tags, a dual-tracking setup that's intentional. The collars report location every 15 minutes. The ear tags report hourly. If an animal wanders outside the new pasture, the redundancy means researchers get an alert fast, without needing to sedate the animal again just to find out where it went. While the animals were immobilized, the veterinary team also collected DNA and other health data, which matters more than it might sound like, because this herd traces back to one of the last genetically pure bison populations in the country. Its lineage runs to the 18 bison that survived in Colorado by 1908, moved to Genesee Park in 1914, and split off 20 animals to start the Daniels Park herd in 1938.
The project also carries a cultural dimension that predates the fencing entirely. Daniels Park is home to the Tall Bull Memorial Grounds, land set aside for Native American ceremonial use since the late 1970s, and the TallBull Memorial Council was part of the planning for this expansion. Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance's own account of the project closed with a line from Lewis TallBull about the order that matters most on this land: water first, then the four-legged, then the winged, then everything else.
Roadside Versus Inside: Where You Can Actually Look Right Now
Here's the part that separates this from a generic "Colorado has bison" story. The new pasture is inside the Backcountry Wilderness Area, and access to the Backcountry has always required an HRCA membership card, even before any bison were involved. The 25-plus miles of trails that run through the property are open to residents and their guests, but the new grazing pasture itself isn't a hiking destination. It's fenced conservation ground, not a trail extension.
That means the reliable way to actually see a bison right now hasn't changed much:
- Daniels Park Road, near the historic Shelter House, remains the main public viewing spot. The herd's primary range is still Daniels Park itself, and the animals are typically visible from the west side of the road, especially in the cooler hours near sunset.
- The Douglas County East/West Regional Trail, which threads along the Backcountry's edge and connects toward Griggs Road, gives HRCA cardholders a chance at a distant sighting, though the animals are just as likely to be out of view inside the fenced pasture.
- The new pasture inside the Backcountry is not currently open for public walk-up viewing. It's managed conservation land, not a trailhead.
HRCA has said reservation-only UTV tours to the new grazing area are coming, along with educational programming tied to the project. As of the most recent public updates from HRCA and the outlets that covered the story this summer, no specific dates, pricing, or booking process had been released. If you want to be first in line when that changes, HRCA's own Backcountry Field Notes blog is where the announcement originated in the first place, and it's the most direct place to watch for an update.
What This Means If You Live Here
The easy version of this story is "there are bison near Highlands Ranch now," and that version is wrong, because bison have been visible from Daniels Park Road for generations. The actual news is narrower and more interesting: the same conservation acreage that borders your neighborhood, the ridge behind BackCountry and Wildcat Ridge that most residents have never thought twice about, is now hosting a piece of one of the oldest and most genetically significant bison conservation programs in the country. Shannon Dennison, who directs Denver Mountain Parks, put the timeline at well over 150 years since bison last grazed this specific ground, and nobody can point to an exact year it stopped.
If you walk the East/West trail at dawn, drive Monarch Boulevard on your way to Rocky Heights, or just take the long way home past Griggs Road most evenings, this is the kind of thing that changes what you're actually looking at out there, even if the view from the road hasn't changed yet.
Christine Martin has spent years tracking the small shifts that make Highlands Ranch feel different from any other Douglas County suburb, from what's happening at the Backcountry to what's changing on Town Center's restaurant row. If you're weighing what's next for your own address here, whether that's a move within Highlands Ranch or a decision about when to make one, Christine Martin is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a complimentary consultation whenever the timing makes sense.
