Seems like just yesterday.

In reality, it has been nearly five years since I wrote a story that the Dawson Elk Valley Ranch had been put on the market for the tidy asking price of $96 million.

To put that into some context, I wrote that while I was in the early stages of researching the history of Dawson and more than a year before I signed a contract with the University of New Mexico Press to publish Crosses of Iron: The Tragic Story of Dawson, New Mexico, and Its Twin Mining Disasters.

So you can imagine my reaction when I came across an online story in mid-December with the headline: “Dawson Elk Valley Ranch Purchased by US Forest Service/Nature Conservancy for $66.7 million.”

As it turns out, the headline wasn’t entirely accurate. But it was enough to launch me on a six-week, fact-finding crusade to compile a story for my website to be shared on social media.

Before doing so, however, I reached out last week to a former colleague at the Albuquerque Journal to see if the paper would have any interest in publishing my story first.

The response: “We’d love it.”

A few days later, the story appeared as the A-1 centerpiece in the Journal’s Sunday edition.

The key takeaway: “The Nature Conservancy has entered into an agreement to purchase the Dawson Elk Valley Ranch in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the Flower Hill Institute, a Jemez Pueblo-based nonprofit dedicated to the cultural preservation of tribal history.”

You can read the full story here.

Now I can’t say all future stories will appear in the Journal.

But I can promise to use this space to keep you informed not only of the sale, but of the new owners’ eventual management plans for the historic townsite.