Political Quotes

“a few months ago, I had a chance to go up to the Colorado-Wyoming border to spend a night at the Ladder Ranch. It is a beautiful property--that is an understatement--situated in the Little Snake River Valley. If you were designing a postcard for the American West, you would struggle to do better than this place. The ranch is owned by Pat and Sharon O'Toole. It has been in the family for six generations, dating all the way back to 1881. To give you some sense of how long that is, at the time, the State of Colorado was just 5 years old, and the Ottoman Empire was still around. Our world has been transformed since then, but the Ladder Ranch has endured through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the two World Wars, and the transformation of our economy. Of course, none of that happened just by chance. It happened because the family looked ahead and made hard choices to deliver that ranch from generation to generation. Pat and Sharon are continuing that legacy today, and they are joined on the ranch by their daughters, and their son, and a whole bunch of grandkids. I am sharing the story of the Ladder Ranch because in many ways, it is the story of farmers and ranchers across my State and across the country--of people applying their ingenuity and common sense to hand more opportunity to the next generation.…”