Wide open spaces with small details
Our friends J & J (with kids M, D, C) bought a really nice chunk of ranch land in New Mexico a few weeks ago. Last week I was lucky enough to go with J out to the ranch and explore it. There is a reason why I don’t want to mention names and/or location of the ranch - don’t ask, I won’t tell.
Just about 1.5 hours from Santa Fe is the 10K acre parcel that changed ownership. J wants to clean up the place, restore the main house and turn it into a real ranch again. When the two told us about this place the first time, I got all excited, especially when they mentioned that they found petroglyphs on their land. So, needless to say, I got even more excited when they offered to take us out there and show us around.
Last Wednesday J took his son D, Bill and me to the ranch for some exploration.
There’s tons of old stuff all over the place and that alone would be enough to fill a small room in a museum:
Pictured above is a detail from the crumbling stucco of the main house, a room filled entirely with old stuff and the last picture shows a neat way to keep the suitcases from the rats (yes, it’s suspended from the ceiling at about 4 feet).
While we were there, the contractor hired to do the remodel, was busy trimming the walls of the main house and J showed us the plans for the remodel:
All around the main house there’s junk on the ground and here are just some impressions of this:
I was intrigued by the deer head mounted on the side of a little cabin. The person who put the head up there did not even bother to remove the skin from the skull. Nice deer jerky for the rats out there:
After looking at the main house, having a BBQ-lunch (thanks again!) and another old home site, we ventured into the hills on one side of the ranch. On one of their trips to the property J & J stumbled over some petroglyphs there and when they checked with people who knew the ranch before, those people confirmed that nobody knew the petroglyphs were there. Guess that would have influenced the price of the ranch!
There must be hundreds of those up there and I would be surprised if they didn’t find more on other hills on the ranch. The picture to the right also gives you an idea on how high those rocks really are:
We looked at a number of other interesting spots on the ranch and it’s just incredible to see how much land 10K acres really is. Thanks for a great day!
