I always thought crab apples were too sour to eat. You may believe this too. But that's just because most of us don't really know apples.
Somewhere in the hilly farmland north of Cortez, Jude Schuenemeyer stands at the base of a tree called a Transcendent Crab.
"Adults pick up on the tart, kids pick up on the sugars in an apple," Schuenemeyer said on this chilly winter morning. "This is a phenomenal-quality crabapple. It’s a golf ball-sized apple. It's got a tartness, high sugar content.... You can park a kid in front of one of these trees, and they will not leave it."
Schuenemeyer is a certified apple nerd in southwest Colorado. And he runs the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project with his wife, Addie. Standing in front of the Transcendent Crab, he gestured lovingly at the tree’s witchy branches.
"It’s a big, big tree," he said. "It’s sort of cracked in the center. The tree itself is probably 2 to 3 feet in diameter, and if you look down on the left side there, you can see the graft line. You see the actual physical scar from where Jasper Hall grafted this tree a hundred and something years ago.
These days, there are only a few hundred acres of apple orchards scattered across Montezuma County. But in the early 1900s one man believed that southwest Colorado would become an apple Mecca.
The remnant orchards still hanging on are what's left of Jasper Hall's vision.
"Jasper Hall died here in 1915," Schuenemeyer said. "This tree is at least a 110 and it could be 125 years old now. But it’s still here."
Was Jasper Hall’s life just an historic footnote? Or was he a visionary, ahead of his time?
As with a lot of history, it depends on who you ask.
Blizzards of apple bloosoms
Jasper Hall was raised in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. His family grew fruit trees there. But he didn’t come to Colorado to plant orchards, at least not initially.
"They came from Green County, Tennessee," said Shelden Zwicker who is great-grandnephew of Jasper Hall.
In the 1880s, Hall joined other family members in the San Juan Mountains above Ophir, Colorado, where they established a mining camp.
"The Halls were gold miners, and there was thirteen in the Hall family in those camps," Zwicker said. "But they got diphtheria. And out of the thirteen, five of them came out alive."
Jasper Hall and his older brother Norman were among those five survivors. Losing so many family members, so quickly, must have been a very harsh lesson.
"They died off up there trying to mine gold and not getting rich," Zwicker said. "All of sudden they decided there’s something we know that we can do, and it ain’t mining gold.
The brothers moved south to Montezuma County.
"They kind of went back to their roots, and started doing what they were raised doing and what they knew how to do," Zwicker said.
They first planted orchards in the sandstone canyons west of Cortez. But soon, Jasper Hall had his eye on the hills north of the city. It was a gutsy move to plant apple trees at an elevation that might be too cold.
"We are high altitude, we’re probably 6800 feet," said Jude Schuenemeyer. "This is as high as anyone has ever attempted commercial apple production, anywhere."
But Jasper Hall guessed that the hills above Cortez would slough cold air off, and that apple trees could survive the cold temperatures.
There was another good reason to grow apples on the shoulders of those hills: they were close to the Denver and Rio Grande’s new railhead in Dolores.
He was only in his 30s at the time, but Jasper Hall’s life experience growing apples, allowed him to see things in that arid landscape that others could not see.
"He understood the ground," said Schuenemeyer. "There was great soil here. This is as perfect an orchard spot, as exists anywhere."
Hall's orchards were diverse, and he planted apple varieties we wouldn’t recognize today.
There was the Transcendent Crab and the Winter Banana. There was an apple called the Chenango Strawberry, which ripened in the middle of summer, and there were winter apples, like the Thunderbolt, that got better in storage, and could last all winter long in a root cellar.
Jasper Hall was considered the fruit wizard of Montezuma County. He was an exceptional grower.
In 1904, Montezuma County fruit brought home several gold medals from the World’s Fair in St Louis, and the orchards were flourishing.
"If you had ridden your horse across here in the early 1900’s, in May, you would have been riding through blizzards of apple blossoms," Schuenemeyer said.
Historic dead end?
For decades following Jasper Hall’s death in 1915, Montezuma County apple orchards continued to expand.
But growers abandoned many of the heritage apple trees, and they focused on the few varieties that you find in grocery stores today–the Jonathan…the Golden and Red Delicious. At first, commodity production helped them prosper.
"When I was real young, apples were the main crop, the main living for people around here," said 67-year-old Conrad Hover, who grew up harvesting apples with his mom and dad, just a mile down the road from where Jasper Hall had lived.
"There were a lot of trees in this area," Hover said. "People were making a living at it. Doing what they love to do."
But eventually Montezuma County couldn’t compete with the huge orchard economies in Washington State and overseas. 15 years ago, after years of diminishing returns, Conrad Hover bulldozed most of his apple trees.
“It got there for a while where you couldn’t hardly get rid of the apples, it just wasn’t worth messing with them," Hover recalled. "The last year, I ended up packing 1200 bushel of apples out to feed to the cows. I'd had enough.”
But when Jude and Addie Schuenemeyer started looking for missing varieties of heritage apples 20 years ago, they started to believe that apples could be a source of income for land owners.
At the headquarters of the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, Jude showed me a pasture of land with rows and rows of dozens of tiny apple trees, each one grafted from a cutting collected around southwest Colorado. Many of these varieties are quite rare. Some may be entirely unique.
"This is a genetic bank, this is our little ark," Schuenemeyer said. "From this orchard we’re able to take these cultivars and get them back out to new orchards."
The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project is focused on saving the heritage varieties of apple trees that were grown here in the early 1900’s. The project promotes growing apples the way Jasper Hall did…diverse orchards with fruit you can’t find in grocery stores. It’s a niche Jude Schuenemeyer says can be profitable, even on small acreage.
At a warehouse nearby, Schuenemeyer showed off a mobile juice press. It’s a crucial piece of equipment that they hope will ensure revenue for local apple growers.
We realized years ago that if we were going to rebuild the fruit economy here, if we going to get people to take the next generation of hundred-year-old trees, and to take care of the old trees they had, we had to have a market for the fruit," Schuenemeyer said. "Without this we can’t tie together everything that needs to be tied together to rebuild the economy."
Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together
In 20 years, the restoration project has had plenty of success in saving old trees. There are even little green shoots of an apple economy here…like local cider makers willing to buy fruit. But rebuilding a regional apple economy in 2026 is hard….really hard…there are some who say it’s impossible.
"Most of our older growers are dead now, or they’re too old to do anything," Schuenemeyer said. "So we’re putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
And even if they do put Humpty Dumpty back together, it’s not clear consumers will care.
Most of us think we already know apples. They’re something we buy at the grocery store, and the majority of people who have never tasted a Transcendent Crab, have no idea what they're missing.
“We’ve had apples that taste like wild honey, like curry. We've had apples that taste like butterscotch. We have apples that taste like vanilla. You get some that taste like sweet tarts. I mean so many different subtleties," Schuenemeyer said. "Consumers have gotten themselves to settle on a few very basic varieties, and they miss out on so much of what’s out there.”
Jude Schuenemeyer is an ardent apple evangelist, and a true believer with faith in Jasper Hall's vision for southwest Colorado.
"He showed us what was possible here," he said. "If this place sucked, these trees would not be alive here a hundred and something years later. But they are here. That is as living a testimony as you can have to how right he was about what he was doing."
The trees Jasper Hall left behind, the records he kept, the arc of his life story...these details may be a historic dead end.
But these remnant pieces of history could just as easily be a map of what is possible. A map that Jasper Hall rolled up more than a hundred years ago, slipped into a bottle sealed with a cork, and set adrift.
A map that just might find its way into the future.
Support for this story also comes from Southwest Colorado’s 250-150 Local Organizing Committee, working to commemorate Colorado's 150th anniversary of statehood.