Our Story, Our Family
Resting ten miles west of Durango, Colorado is a community of ranchers who prefer rugged outdoor country to crowded city streets. Here, in Hesperus, Colorado the Foutz family established Cross Creek Ranch. In this idyllic setting, their ancestral roots run deep dating back to the late 19th Century, where they began working the land by farming and ranching throughout southwestern La Plata County, Colorado, and northwestern San Juan County, New Mexico. What began as a modest cattle ranch allowed them to utilize the hospitable land and connect with the nature surrounding them. As the children grew, so did the ranch. The ranch grew from a few hundred acres to 2,800 acres spanning in a valley surrounded by the Rocky Mountains. Their determination and passion for Cross Creek Ranch made the land a haven for their animals and a refuge for their family.
Today, Cross Creek Ranch, in addition to their cattle operation, is home to a collection of horses, elk, wild turkeys, and cattle. Seeing many generations grow from children to adults, Cross Creek Ranch has remained the place the family considers home. The fond memories and traditions that have been borne from the ranch are attributed mainly to the delicious meals they shared here. As they are cattle ranchers, they frequently used beef from their ranch for meals and discover that their beef was superior in quality and taste. Their passion for quality beef is what has led them to produce some of the highest-grade Wagyu beef available.
As Cross Creek Ranch shared their delectable beef with friends and neighbors, demand grew for their product. The family invested in state-of-the-art animal husbandry technology, and eventually set their resources on raising a kind of cattle with a legendary reputation: Japanese Wagyu.
Once a forbidden export from Japan, Wagyu Beef has been bred for one specific reason: flavor. Wagyu cattle originate from the same bloodline in Japan are raised to be fat, voracious eaters, who are never given antibiotics. Wagyu beef flavor yields a subtle buttery umami flavor that produces a pleasant savory taste. Umami is a taste that naturally compliments the human palette, because is one of the five tastes that can be processed. Research states that breast milk contains umami, and that the content of umami is twenty times more than cow’s milk. Fullblood Wagyu Beef has the greatest umami flavor profile possible in a protein.
By learning from Japanese breeders, and their own experience, Cross Creek Ranch has developed a tradition of excellence you taste in every bite. All Cross Creek Ranch beef are raised following Japanese cattle husbandry tenets that provide utmost tender and flavorful beef available. The variables used for raising cattle at Cross Creek Ranch are superior Wagyu genetics, a stress-free environment, clean snow-melted water, the healthiest diet of grasses and nutritional food supplements that are free of pesticides.
Cross Creek Ranch not only provides a stress-free environment for their cattle but waits three full years for their cattle to reach matured harvesting age, therefore developing a greater complex and texture contributing to the quality of their beef. Cross Creek Ranch uses the precise variables to produce their premium Wagyu, such as superior genetics and the healthiest diet for their cattle. Cross Creek Ranch is sure that you will fall in love with their Wagyu as much as their family has, because what the meat they serve you is what they would at their own dinner table.
