Continental Divide Trail -- Ghost Ranch

We watched the full eclipse of the sun from the parking lot of our little motel in Cuba, New Mexico.  Viewing it through a pin hole projector made from paper plates, we were awed as the world turned dark before dusk.  It was a sad comment on the town itself which is also in a deep eclipse.  Cuba is on its way down and even the waitress of the restaurant near our motel had dubbed it a “dying town.”   At least the sun made its daily appearance the next morning. 

Much of the town is comprised of vacant lots that have become active prairie dog towns and watching them sitting on their burrows was the high point of our day.  But then we would watch them in the wild just as well, whistling and clicking to each other in distress when we got too close.     

We had come into town from the southwest, over mesa country on the Continental Divide Trail, Nancy, Eric, Wyoming and me.  Four days of more than twenty miles, with one thirty miler thrown in for good measure and we were tired and spent a day letting our feet cool off.  That’s known as a “zero” in thru hiker parlance, and is any day with no mileage.  

On leaving town to the northeast, we were amazed at the change in the land.  Pavement gave way to lush green fields and irrigation canals brimming with water lining our road walk.  Within a few miles we found ourselves hiking in forests of pine, fir and aspen with long willow brakes down the creek banks.  An old dog followed us all the way to the trailhead and we had to shoo the poor thing back down the road for fear he was looking for a new owner, before we set foot into the San Pedro Wilderness.  

We had lunch at the trailhead, no doubt just what the dog was hoping for, when up walked Blister, another hiker finishing up his “Triple Crown” a thru hike of America’s three greatest trails, the Appalachian, Pacific Crest and Continental Divide.  Arguably the three greatest trails in the world.  Originally from New Hampshire, he’s thirty-six and had hiked the Notches in his youth and finished the AT in 2006 and the PCT in 2011, the biggest snow year our Sierra and Cascade trail has ever seen.  He now lives in Nebraska amid corn fields happily married to a woman who loves Nebraska, her life long home.  Blister clearly supplements with a thru hike every now and then and revels in the mountain scenery.

He’s a hell of a hiker with a wicked sense of humor and was a welcome addition to our party.  Nancy and I took some pleasure in his chagrin at finding that we hike darn fast for old folks.  He admitted he’d had his doubts, but we keep up.  We can’t give it the speed of Eric or Blister, but we turn up at lunch and for every break.  That’s geezer power!

Dandelions and lupin colored the path up to the San Pedro Parks at the top.  There are no real peaks.  We reached ten-thousand feet and found snow rimmed, flooded meadows that stretched for miles.  Our trail bisected a number of them and we walked in wet feet for the first time since the Gila River, weeks before, and it felt wonderful.  Over the miles my feet swell and get sore and the first plunge into cold water is like walking with an icepack.  Refreshing and healing, I got used to walking wet on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2010, and still don’t mind it.  An added benefit is that your socks get washed without taking them off! 

We camped at the Forest Service trailhead at Cecilia Creek under a large Douglas fir and fell asleep to the sound of water.  

The next day our trail returned to dry mesa country and the snow and flooded meadows seemed unthinkable, only one day but an entire ecosystem away.  Winding down through the canyons we came upon basket bush growing lushly along the path.  A close relative to poison oak and ivy, I’ve picked up a good case of it from those miles.    

In the late afternoon we crossed the Rio Chama on Skull Bridge.  Such an ominous name.  We were ten miles from Ghost Ranch, the mesa surrounded home of Georgia O’Keeffe.  The cliffs and other natural surroundings are the subjects of many of her greatest works.  From the mid 1950s it has been a retreat center run by the Presbyterian Church and is one of the most treasured rest stops on the Continental Divide Trail.  But this place has some history. 

Part of a large Spanish land grant in 1766 to Captain Pedro Martin Serrano, by the latter part of the 1800s, it had become home to the cattle rustling and murderous Archuleta brothers who built Ghost House, a small adobe that is still used at the retreat center.  There modus operandi was to steal cattle and when the owners came looking for them, kill the owners.  They named the area, Rancho de los Brujos, Ranch of the Witches.  They spread stories of giant “earth babies” howling in the night and of a ghost cow with wings, to keep people from exploring the canyons where they hid the cattle.

One of the brothers got a bit crazy and stole cattle from the other and was killed by him in revenge.  Nice guys.  A posse of locals finally had had enough and moved in, hanging the remaining brother and some of his men, and the area was left alone with its ghosts for some time.  

It traded hands in a poker game and eventually ended up in the care of Carol Stanley in a divorce settlement.  She was a Bostonian, a concert pianist, but she had dreams of running Rancho de los Brujos as a dude ranch for wealthy Easterners.  She moved here  with her grand piano and English maid and started ranching.  

In 1933, Arthur Pack, editor and publisher of Nature Magazine, visited and built a house on the ranch and began helping out.  He and his wife Phoebe eventually came to own the dude ranch which they gave to the Presbyterian Church in 1955.  The church has run it as an international retreat center ever since.  Rancho de los Brujos became Ghost Ranch a name that seemed more palatable and the name stuck.

Ghost Ranch is also home to one of the ten most important fossil beds in the world and has it’s own museum of archeology and paleontology.  It’s not just dinosaur bones, however, the cliffs in this area come to us from the late Triassic Period, 225 million years ago, before the dinosaurs, a time when giant crocodilian creatures ruled the shallow waters.  One particularly rich fossil site is made up of numerous Coelophysis skeletons, a relatively small creature about our size.  These ill fated fellows had been fishing on the banks of a river, much like grizzly bears today, when they were all washed away by a flash flood.  They were deposited and covered with mud along with a large number of the fish they were after, and are now the subject of scientists from many of our great universities. 

Most famous, however, was Georgia O’Keeffe's tenure at Ghost Ranch. The artist first visited in 1934 and eventually built a home.  Many of her works are paintings of the red and purple hills that surround the place and from the snags and skulls she found in her wanderings.  An artist with her eye, she saw the beauty inherent in the landscape and lived here for nearly fifty years.  The place is still imbued with the vision she created in her paintings.  It’s hard to look at the tilted, flat top of Pedernal, a mountain she used in many works, or the red cliffs above the ranch that she called her backyard, and not see her stylized canvas images.

When we hiked onto the property we were given a room that came to just over $28 per night per person, four to our dorm style room, breakfast included!  Then we started to explore.  On the grounds are a copy of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth for walking meditation, cut out of the sage brush and lined in local sandstone, a Zen meditation garden, a library open twenty-four hours per day, massage, a shop and dining hall and during the summer, horseback riding, a pool and no locks on the doors. 

If you think this is a plug for a place, it is.  It’s one of the loveliest retreat centers I’ve ever been to.  If you have any thought of a trip to New Mexico and have a love of art or spectacular landscapes with some good meals and a deep sense of spirit thrown in, put this place on your itinerary.  Classes in every subject imaginable are offered year round. 

Best of all, most of the people staying here are artists, writers and professors, all of whom are wonderful to talk with.  I spent the better part of an evening talking to Bill, a Lutheran minister and professor, on the bigness of God, and the smallness of religion.  At least that’s what it seemed like to me.  Later I had a wonderful conversation with Ruth, a young writer from San Francisco out on her first road trip of the soul, Route 66 of course.  It turned out she had gone to Columbia with Dan White, the author of The Cactus Eaters, the book that first turned my head toward a serious attempt on the PCT several years ago.  It's hilarious and a great read.  Ruth has been in a writer’s group with Dan ever since and was glad to hear that he’d been of influence.  Such a small world, but it seems to concentrate here at Ghost Ranch.   

When we crossed Skull Bridge on our way to the Ghost Ranch, I had wondered if it was named for one of O’Keeffe’s works, so many of which deal with the smooth, white, sun bleached bones of animal skulls found on desert mesas.  We’ve seen plenty.  Or maybe it had to do with the spooky nature of the Archuleta brothers and their stories.  So I asked the librarian, who didn’t know, but knew someone who would.  She called the resident historian who’s been here for over thirty years and she answered quite plainly that it had to do with river runners, kayakers and rafters who tend to bump their skulls on the metal underside of the bridge at high water.  So simple, but still a life or death matter.

The sunset has just colored the cliffs crimson and my day of rest is over.  Tomorrow we begin an eighty-eight mile stretch to the little town of Chama, only twelve miles from the border with Colorado and the San Juan Mountains.  We’ve had a recent post that in spite of the record low snows this year, there’s still plenty of it up there.  The Facebook post warned us to bring extra food as the going was slow.  

Wyoming has ordered an ice ax and crampons to be sent to our next stop and the rest of us are having them delivered as well.  One more desert trail and we’ll be living at 13,000 feet for weeks of high mountain travel.  Until then, we’ve had the best day off trail any of us has ever experienced.  Ghost Ranch has lived up to the beauty of her reputation, a place that captured one of the great artists of the twentieth century and will live far beyond its geographic location through her works, as long as a love of art survives in the species.

"The sun shines not on us but in us."  John Muir

If you would like to follow our daily journals, Google: Postholer.com/Shroomer or Postholer.com/Nancy.  An interactive map of the CDT on the bottom right of our journal pages will show you our current GPS Spot location.  View it through Google earth and you can see where we’re camped for that night.