What seems most apparent about Hal Shepherd, as he offers a tour of his Neville Log Home, is his compassion, not only toward humankind but toward the earth.
Shepherd started building his two-story house in 2007 after purchasing 42 acres at Indian Camp Ranch, a 1,200-acre archaeological site west of Cortez where he serves as the homeowners association’s president.
“I like the idea that Archie and Mary Hanson preserved this place. ... And you can walk around here and find shards,” he says.
Shepherd has discovered pieces of Anasazi pottery in his backyard, and he marvels at the paint and pottery the Ancestral Puebloans made during the Pueblo II period, from 900 to 1100 A.D.
“To think that paint is still there,” he says while pointing to a dark stripe that lasts on the clay.
Shepherd has led Indian Camp Ranch landowners to be included in the National Register of Historic Places in Colorado. He worked out a three-year partnership with Crow Canyon Archaeological Center’s Scott Ortman and archaeologist Shanna Diedrichs to begin a Basketmaker III dig to study Ancestral Puebloan ruins.
“We just finished the first one this year,” Shepherd says of the study.
Besides ancient ruins, Shepherd’s land is peppered with pinyon and juniper trees.
“They call it a PJ forest,” he says while explaining how the pinyons nestle near the junipers. He has hired a mason to frame some of the front yard’s larger junipers with 3-foot, rock walls.
“I think it’s pretty,” he says of the masonry and trees.
Shepherd also appreciates the native sagebrush that grows on his land. He leans over to pluck a few leaves from a sage plant that grows on the edge of his driveway.
“I love the way it smells,” he says.
He calls his home a ranch condo, because Al Heaton, a ranch contractor, has a lease to run cattle and grow winter wheat within Indian Camp Ranch.
“Last year he grew 450 acres of winter wheat,” Shepherd says.
PEACE, QUIET AND BOOKS
Inside Shepherd’s home, the kitchen smells like fresh doughnuts, and the majestic peaks of the La Platas fill his windows.
“I like the peace and quiet,” he says. “I like the views, and I built this house with a second-floor deck. So I read a lot, being a history major, so I sit up there on the second-floor deck overlooking Mesa Verde.”
Shepherd cuts down dead trees from his 20 acres of woods to keep his fireplace crackling and is proud of his book collection.
He winds his way around his Engelmann spruce stairwell to his library while naming some of his favorite U.S presidents, such as Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.
“Roosevelt is my favorite,” he says.
His library is filled with books he has read, including “House of Rain” by Craig Childs.
“He said on my right is Mesa Verde, and on my left is Sleeping Ute Mountain. And I said, ‘Well, he’s straight down there some place, and I just thought that was really neat,’” Shepherd says.
BENJAMIN SHEPHERD AND TEDDY ROOSEVELT
He keeps a photograph in his library of himself signing a book by Gifford Pinchot at his son’s graduation at Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies in 2007. Shepherd mentions President Teddy Roosevelt was the first to sign the book.
Shepherd was married six years, during which time Benjamin Shepherd, his only child, was born.
Shepherd’s life seems filled with unique coincidences. For example, Benjamin Shepherd now works across the street from Roosevelt’s birth place in New York City.
How he landed in Cortez might also be a coincidence — or divine providence.
“Cortez called me back first,” he says as to how he got here after applying to two city manager jobs in Prescott, Ariz., and Cortez in 1999.
Shepherd says he’s enjoyed living in Southwest Colorado and being city manager in Cortez. But this year Shepherd has been trying to pare down his responsibilities so he can take more time to enjoy life, work on his home and to travel to historic locales.
“I’m done. I want to see Lewis and Clark,” he says with pleading eyes. Shepherd has visited portions of the historic Lewis and Clark trail in Idaho and Montana. “I can’t travel if I have to be at a meeting every week.”
GROWING UP IN OHIO
Hal Shepherd grew up in Hamilton, Ohio. He has a bachelor of arts degree in history and master of arts in political science from Miami University in Oxford.
“I was going to be a teacher,” he says.
And he was a teacher for two years, in Summit, N.J.
“Summit was a nice place to live,” he says. “And I got to enjoy New York City on the weekends. It was just a train ride into Hoboken, and it tubes over to Manhattan.”
After his second year in Summit, the dean of men asked him to return to Miami University to work as a head resident and academic advisor of a freshman men’s quad. Shepherd took the job.
“That was fall of ’69,” he says. “And spring of ’70 was Kent State, where we had the shootings by the National Guard at Kent State University.”
During the time of the anti-Vietnam War movement, all of the universities in Ohio ended up being shut down, he says.
“Because it was radicals — I mean, it was a different world,” he says. “There were radical students fire-bombing buildings. The president didn’t feel he could keep the students safe,” he says.
In fall of 1970, Miami University began establishing its own campus police force instead of university security.
“One of my jobs was university discipline. I’d have to hold hearings for students,” he says. “I rode around with the university police to see what was going on.”
Shepherd ended up graduating from the state police academy in 1970.
Later, in 1972, he was sworn in as a police officer while working for the city of Hamilton, Ohio.
HAMILTON, OHIO
While researching a paper about labor relations, Shepherd interviewed the city manager of the town where he grew up — Hamilton, Ohio.
On the same day, the city manager asked Shepherd to move back and work for the city.
“I asked the dean, and he said: ‘Sounds like a great opportunity. You should take it,’” Shepherd said.
So in 1972, Shepherd began to work as assistant city manager and assistant director of public safety in Hamilton.
The town had about 68,000 people and 900 city employees in 13 departments.
“Besides the regular police, fire, public works, public health, personnel, law, finance, community development and planning, we had gas, water, electric and wastewater operations,” he says.
“This city generated its own electric system. We had steam-fired electric and hydro-electric, and we distributed the electric to the entire city.”
Hamilton also has the largest gas system in the state.
“We also serviced water for a lot of the county residents, so we had over 200,000 people serviced under the county’s water system,” he says.
After working as assistant city manager for 17 years and gaining a variety of fans, the city asked Shepherd to become its manager and director of public safety in 1989.
He agreed and worked as the city’s manager for a decade.
Shepherd remains the longest-serving city manager of Hamilton since 1945.
“Ten years of that, and I was burned out,” he says. “I had a nice big sendoff, but I was looking for a smaller community.”
It’s no wonder that, when Hal retired from the city of Hamilton, several hundred people came out to wish him farewell.
Hamilton’s Journal-News writes under the headline ‘Shepherd has done well, will do well there’ in an editorial: “So now it’s official. Hal Shepherd ... is headed west. Good for him. ... if you ask whether Hamilton is better off after 10 years of Shepherd at the helm, the answer would have to be a resounding yes.”
Shepherd, among a heap of other accomplishments, led the construction of three fire houses as Hamilton’s manager.
The city’s 24,700-square-foot fire district headquarters was later built and dedicated to him, and named The Hal Shepherd Hamilton Fire Headquarters at a Christmas ceremony in 1999.
“The city council wanted that,” Shepherd said humbly. “The funny thing is that it was my dad who was a career firefighter.”
Shepherd has saved a clipping of one of the weekly columns Shepherd wrote for the Journal-News.
In it, he pays homage to his late father, Harold S. Shepherd.
Shepherd’s mother, the late Gertrude “Trudy” Shepherd, and his son, Benjamin, were present for the fire headquarters’ groundbreaking in 1998.
CORTEZ CITY MANAGER
Shepherd, who had been interested in the American West for a long time, was 55 years old and had been serving the public for 32 years before he became Cortez’s manager in 1999.
“He was a very easy man to work for, very supportive of the police department,” Cortez Police Chief Roy Lane says of Shepherd’s management. “I’ve worked for eight city managers, and he was very good.”
Members of the fire board and other city employees agree.
“He provided the opportunity for a lot to be accomplished, like the rec center and for me to become the grants and special projects coordinator,” says A. Chris Burkett, Cortez’s former parks and recreation director.
“My first project was the library,” Shepherd says of his bigger accomplishments in Cortez.
“I had a construction manager, Rick Smith, general services manager. He did the library, welcome center and animal shelter.”
Shepherd worked with Smith and the city’s librarian, Joanie Howland, to expand the library building’s size.
“We had a tiny, little library,” Shepherd says. “And then we made it about three or four times larger ... and made it look like something that wasn’t anything like the original.”
Under Shepherd’s leadership, the city also remodeled and expanded the public works buildings and the Colorado Welcome Center and a new water plant with Public Works Director Bruce Smart.
“I wasn’t the one that brought it up, but things don’t happen just like that,” he says of the many public works he’s been involved with. “You have to have someone to cheerlead the project, or it just never happens.”
Shepherd was able to get a grant from the Department of Local Affairs to build the updated welcome center, because he concluded it would be efficient to have the welcome center, tourism department, retail program and chamber of commerce all under one roof.
“Kristine Nunn was the chamber director that went with me to get the grant for the Welcome Center project,” Shepherd writes.
With Shepherd at its helm, the city also built the recreation center. Shepherd also developed the idea and got the funding for the construction of the city’s newest animal shelter.
“He was very aggressive in getting it done,” Lane says of Shepherd’s work to get a kennel built. “We were renting a building at the time, and it was insufficient for what we were doing.”
Shepherd also led the city support for a homeless shelter.
“I saw a need to help homeless people out, and the person that really spearheads that is MB McAfee,” Shepherd said.
But Shepherd refuses to applaud himself for all of Cortez’s accomplishments throughout his time as city manager.
“It’s not a one-man show,” he says. “I want to give credit; it’s not just me.”
He is thankful for his staff and city council in Cortez and applauds them for the many feats they accomplished as a team.
Hamilton and Cortez were both left with more money than when Shepherd started as each city’s manager. Cortez’s annual budget was one-tenth that of Hamilton’s when Shepherd started working in Cortez in 1999.
Shepherd enjoyed his leadership role in Cortez, but a nearly fatal accident and city regulations forced him to retire earlier than he planned.
Hit by a truck while walking in 2003, Shepherd was launched about 30 feet in the air.
Shepherd says he was later told by a witness that he landed, his body gurgling, in a curbside gutter.
“I didn’t feel it,” he says. “But it hurt like hell when I woke up.”
“She thought I was dead,” he says of the witness who found him. Her husband worked for the hospital, and Shepherd was immediately brought in for surgery.
He regained consciousness while doctors were sewing up his head.
“I’ve recovered completely, but when I was in the hospital I thought, ‘I had these plans to build this house, and here somebody else comes along, doesn’t see me and knocks me for a loop.’”
“So I decided then I was going to cut my tenure in Cortez by at least two years,” he says, but seems apologetic for leaving his role as city manager. “I would’ve stayed if I didn’t have to live in city limits.”
He resigned about four years after the accident in 2007.
CORTEZ FIRE DISTRICT
The city has a part-time, paid fire department thanks in part to Shepherd’s leadership.
“My dad was a career firefighter,” Shepherd says. “I spent a lot of time in fire houses growing up.”
He says the time he spent with his father and the time he spent with law enforcement officials helped him in his leadership roles.
“I looked at government doing things that people can’t do for themselves,” Shepherd says. “And police and fire is a very critical piece of that. That’s why you have 911. If you have a police problem or a fire problem, you call and get help.”
Shepherd’s first experience fighting a wildfire was in Cortez.
“We had big fires, but we didn’t have wildfires,” he says about Hamilton. “I didn’t know what a wildfire was until I came out here.”
Shepherd’s time with Cortez’s firefighters has been interesting, because he had never worked with an all-volunteer staff, he says.
“We went through this process of getting them partially paid,” Shepherd says.
The fire department’s staff of three is now on-call 24 hours a day, which has significantly cut its response times.
“I was also involved with the hiring of the first, paid fire chief in Cortez,” he says.
Shepherd began serving on Cortez’s Fire District Board in 2000. Most recently, Keenan Ertel appointed Shepherd to serve a third term on the board after a member quit in 2010.
“I’ll be retiring — again — for the last time in April 2012,” he says.
BUSINESS CLUB
Shepherd is stepping down from his leadership role with the Cortez Business Club this year.
“The Business Club was unique because it wasn’t a required thing,” he says.
While Shepherd was meeting with city council on Tuesday nights and the Cortez Fire District on Wednesday nights, he suggested to fellow Rotarians a change in meeting time from Monday evenings to a lunch-time gathering, but voters declined his request.
“So I talked to others and said, ‘Why don’t we just start our own club? No dues, nothing, just come and enjoy a good speaker,’” he says.
The Business Club is now in its 11th year.
The Cortez Area Chamber of Commerce will be kicking off next year’s Business Club meetings at noon Wednesday, Jan. 4, at Nero’s Italian Restaurant, 303 W. Main St.
Shepherd has also served on the Onward Community Foundation in Cortez and other stewardships in Durango and Hamilton.
After accumulating a lengthy list of accomplishments, Shepherd says he’s ready to relax and enjoy.
Reach Nathalie Winch at nathaliew@cortezjournal.com.