47Jake and Stephaine were homeschooled by Deb, in part so they
could help out on the ranch. There was always plenty of work
on the 700 acres: branding calves, baling hay, repairing tractors,
leading hunting trips, caring for the horses. As Rudy got older, he
had a harder time keeping up—and Jake was expected to pick up
the slack. The family was often the last to finish putting up their
hay for the season, because Rudy and Jake handled all the work
themselves, Jake’s friend and former neighbor Adam Katheiser
told me. And when Rudy was no longer able, it was just Jake.
As a teenager, Jake began attending public school for the first
time. Early on, he got in trouble for the rifle in the back of his truck;
he hadn’t realized you weren’t supposed to bring firearms to school.
After spending much of his youth isolated on the ranch, Jake began
to amass a group of friends. He and Ajarian, both introverts, found
it easy to be quiet around each other. Their crew grew to include
other guys with similarly low-key temperaments. They went camp-
ing, fiddled with their motorcycles, and made fun of one another
for all the project vehicles that never quite got all the way fixed.
After high school, Jake stayed at the ranch while most of the
crew rented apartments in town. Jake could be standoffish with
strangers, but he was inseparable from his friends. He seemed to
have a boundless —occasionally exhausting—appetite for hang-
ing out. He could be a know-it-all, and if he thought you were
doing something stupid, he wouldn’t hesitate to tell you so. His
friends sometimes rolled their eyes, but they appreciated that they
always knew where they stood with him. “We used to say, ‘Yeah
he’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole,’ ” Ajarian said.
Jake was 23 when Rudy died, in 2009. Stephaine had already
received an inheritance of $30,000. Jake didn’t get any money;
the assumption was that he and his stepbrother, Shane—Rudy’s
son from his first marriage, who lived in Texas—would eventu-
ally inherit the ranch. Now the full burden of maintaining the
property fell on Jake’s shoulders. If he thought about shirking his
obligations, he never did. “Gunnison ranchers don’t move away,”
Jake’s friend Tom Page told me. Jake was tied to the land, to his
family—and to a dying way of life.
Though the mythology of the American rancher
looms large in our national imagination, economic pressures
and climate change have made small-scale ranching ever more
precarious. Since 2000, the Colorado River Basin has suffered
an un precedented period of drought, and low commodity prices
and the rising cost of living haven’t helped matters. The suicide
rate in Gunnison and other rural Colorado counties is more than
twice the national average.
Faced with a deficit of water, Colorado’s booming cities have
turned to a “buy and dry” policy, in which farmers agree to let their
land lie fallow and lease their water rights to thirsty urban areas
hundreds of miles away. By the time Jake took charge of the family
ranch, the gulf between rural and urban Colorado was vast: the
agricultural land of the Rockies’ western slope lying uncultivated
and slowly drying up, while in Denver so many new buildings
were being erected that there was a waiting list to rent a crane.
Ranch life was becoming the purview of wealthy hobbyists
who could afford to indulge in cowboy fantasies. In Gunnison
County, not far from the 7-11 Ranch, the billionaire business-
man Bill Koch built his own private replica of an Old West town,
complete with a saloon, church, jail, and train station; the prop-
erty’s 21,000-square-foot mansion is stocked with memorabilia,
including firearms that belonged to Jesse James and Sitting Bull.
News accounts would later refer to 7-11 as a “$3 million
ranch,” but when Jake disappeared, “it was kind of a junkyard,”
Lopez told me. Jake lived in the lodge, a building that had been
intended for big gatherings and camp suppers; now it was so
cluttered with Deb and Rudy’s collections—stuffed rattlesnakes,
old bits and bridles, ancient guns, antique machines with unclear
uses—that it barely had enough room for his bed.
Jake once asked Katheiser to help brand calves. Katheiser had
helped friends out before, and knew that typically a calf was herded
into a mechanical chute, where a clamp closed around the animal’s
neck, immobilizing it and then flipping it on its side. Katheiser
was surprised to see that the 7-11 Ranch had no such equipment.
It was a day of rough, physical work—snagging the calves with a
rope, wrestling them to the ground, then holding them down to
be branded. The corral itself needed maintenance. But Jake could
never get to it, “because the fences need fixing, the truck needs
fixing, and we’ve got to brand all these cows now,” Katheiser said.
Faced with more than they could handle, the family sold
off much of their livestock and stopped hosting hunting trips.
Money became a source of tension between Deb and her son. Jake
didn’t receive a paycheck for the hours he put in at the ranch; his
eventual inheritance of the property was supposed to be payment
enough. In the meantime, if he wanted to go to the movies or
the Alamo, he’d have to ask Deb for cash.
Frustrated, Jake found other ways to scrounge up money. He
cut and sold firewood. He worked part-time for a land scaping
company. He came up with a scheme to grow marijuana to sell
to college students, which his friends found hilarious: Dude,
you don’t smoke weed—how are you going to test your product? He
cultivated psychedelic mushrooms and looked into starting a
chimney-sweeping business.
One summer, Jake made good money working on a commercial
fishing boat in Alaska—but when he returned home, he ended
up giving Deb $15,000 to help keep the ranch afloat. “He was
always pissed off about that,” Ajarian told me. “He always said he
should’ve just said Fuck the ranch and kept it.” But while Jake may
have talked about the property as if it were an anchor dragging him
down, he was unwilling to walk away. What if the ranch was a once-
in-a-lifetime opportunity? What if he could restore it to greatness?
However much Jake worked, it wasn’t enough for his mother.
If the ranch wasn’t thriving the way it had under Rudy, it wasn’t
due to the drought or the economy or any of the other forces
that plagued ranchers across the western states. The problem was
that her son wasn’t trying hard enough. She complained that he
slept too late and left jobs unfinished. “Whenever you were out
there,” Ajarian said, “they’d be at each other’s throats.”
When Jake vanished, some of his friends hoped that he’d
finally reached his limit and taken off: Fine, you guys deal with this
place. It was nice to imagine him somewhere sunny, California
maybe, free to do as he pleased. But that daydream never quite felt