The Buildings
The property is configured with a heavy emphasis on horse riding. There’s a large indoor riding arena, 10-stall stable (separate from the attached one previously mentioned), and miles of riding trails, which the Blakes made with wood chips from felled pine trees on the ranch.

There are other maintenance buildings and staff quarters, including a three-bedroom ranch manager’s house at the property’s entrance, a refurbished barn with its own apartment, and an equipment shed that houses tractors, their boat, and other machinery.

The houses are reached by a 2-mile-long road that snakes halfway up the property.

The “guest house” is 7,500 square feet and has six en suite bedrooms, which include a master bedroom and a two-bedroom mother-in-law apartment. (The mother-in-law apartment has its own kitchen and living area.) The guest house, the Blakes say, is the grander of the two homes. It has a lodgelike, open-plan living area with a cathedral ceiling.

“That’s where we do all the entertaining and cooking,” says Magness Blake. “One time we took the furniture out and had 200 people in it for a nonprofit event.”

The main house, which the Blakes live in, is more homey, they say. It’s slightly smaller—under 7,000 square feet—though it also has six bedrooms. “When people visit us,” Blake says, “we show them both homes and we ask each of them: If you were us, which would have chosen to live in?” Answers, he says, are split 50/ 50. “They just have a different feel,” he explains.

There’s also a restored cabin, which Blake calls a “a big wooden tent for the grandchildren,” and a winterized log cabin used by workers on the ranch.

The Property
Most of the property is uninhabited, with several creeks that run through it, seven ponds, rolling fields, and aspen groves. With the exception of 60 cows that graze on the property and wild turkeys (the Blakes bred the turkeys themselves, “but they’re so doggone good we don’t ever see them anymore”), the ranch is an oasis of calm. “It’s not unusual, when you wander out and keep quiet, to see both elk and moose,” he says.

But given their obligations, and the fact that they visit it so seldom—“we haven’t gotten there more than a week a year, for the last several years,” Blake says—the cost of operating the ranch “got hard to justify.”

“We’re very sad about selling,” Magness Blake adds. “We’re conflicted, but it gets down to being practical. We’re getting older, and we have to look forward to doing things appropriate to our age.”