Our Story

My family bought the 100 acres when I was in high school at Raytown South in Kansas City. My dad Kelly had a vision: somewhere we could connect with nature, improve the land, and hunt every season the MDC offered.

The first few years we only hunted the front. The back — a quarter mile wide, three quarters long — was so overgrown you couldn't walk it. The older hunters sent the younger ones to stir game out, and the rest of us waited for the deer to break.

In the eighties, Dad and his hunting buddy Cliff had a controlled burn of what is now the Clover Field. The fire got bigger than they planned, then bigger than that. When they finally couldn't stop it, they drove into town to Perry Foster's Barbeque before heading back to the city. My parents made quite an impact on the community. Being Kelly and Lucy's boy is something I still mention whenever I can.

When I was seven, I started hunting with my dad. On weekends he and I would knock on the doors of farmhouses and ask if we could squirrel hunt. He called me Eagle Eye back then. We hunted mainly dove and turkeys in the spring, deer in the fall.

The oldest stand on the property overlooks the Clover Field. In retirement, my folks would carry cappuccino to the “outhouse” Dad built to hunt from. They would count deer in the evenings before season. Dad was my trail camera while I was still working in the city.

By fall the woods are loud — squirrels, turkeys, every critter stirring up the leaf litter. The smell of fall woods that tells you winter is coming. Dad blowing leaves off the campground as the family rolled in from a week of work. Friday night before opening morning, he'd have a fire going and steaks on the open grill. Just family, plus my hunting buddy Dean, who'd earned all rights and privileges. Primal energy. Locked and loaded by 5 AM.

In forty years of hunting that ground, we never took a Boone & Crockett buck. We hunted as hard as anyone. We knew the land. But the trophy never came, and we couldn't quite say why.

The first time I ran our property through Terrain Brain, my heart was racing. There it was on the map: the deer flow skirts the property. Our 100 isn't a trophy destination — never was. It's a family meat-hunting property, a conservation property, the kind of place that fills freezers and teaches kids and grounds you when life gets loud. Terrain Brain showed me in five minutes what forty years had been quietly telling us.

That's what TFP is for. Not turning every property into a trophy farm. Showing landowners and hunters what their land actually is, and matching the two honestly.

My daughters have already paid the price for being Colwell girls — each got left in the forest after dark on a snipe hunt at least once. They forgave me. I want them, and their kids, to walk this ground forty years from now and find it functional, flourishing, accessible when they want it, left alone when they don't.

Mostly I want to leave it better than I found it. That's the whole project.

— Clark Colwell, Founder, Terra Firma Partners