Ghost Ranch: north of Abiquiu, New Mexico, April 2017

Ghost Ranch became a destination in our O'Keeffe Country trip because Georgia has a home there; it became her spring and summer retreat for painting.

Ghost Ranch was part of the Piedra Lumbre, Spanish for Shining Rock, a 1766 land grant to Pedro Martin Serrano from Charles III of Spain. The Rito del Yeso runs through the canyons and gorge providing a source of water.

The ranch became notorious for some time thanks to the Archuleta brothers, who were cattle rustlers and murderers. Due to the box canyon that provided "invisiblity," the brothers were able to hide the stolen cattle from anyone who tried to reclaim a herd.  The name comes from the stories of people hearing the cries of ghosts of all the victims of the Archuleta brothers. In the end, one brother shot the other and terrorized his late brother's wife and child, who escaped one night on a burro.

When the wife explained what happened, a group of ranchers went to the ranch, even though they, too, feared the ghosts, and hanged the remaining brother and his gang from a cottonwood tree by one of the casitas on the ranch.

The history of the ranch is chronicled in a wonderful book called Ghost Ranch by Lesley Poling-Kempes. I found this in the adobe late in our stay so I was only able to start reading it.

Ghost Ranch, with its 21,000 acres including lots of red rock scenery, has been used in filming a number of movies including one of my favorites, City Slickers with Billy Crystal. The cabin and corral remains on the site, which is located near the entrance of the ranch.

Great spot for a selfie. Notice Pedernal in the far background.

Besides City Slickers (1991), these films were also shot on Ghost Ranch: Silverado (1985), The Last Outlaw (1993 TV movie), Wyatt Earp (1994), Wild Wild West (1999), All the Pretty Horses (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Georgia O'Keeffe (2009 TV movie), Year One (2009), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), Lone Ranger (2013), Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

Long after the Archuleto brothers were gone, the ranch became a dude ranch for wealthy Easterners mostly. One visitor in the 1930s was Arthur Newton Pack, a writer and editor of Nature Magazine. Because of a sickly daughter, Pack brought his family to the ranch with its dry climate. The owner, Carol Stanley, was having a hard time breaking even so she sold the ranch to Pack. 

He built an adobe home on the ranch for his family, naming it Rancho de los Burros; a wild herd of burros had been moved to the ranch, and his children rode them. 

This is the pueblo Rancho de los Burros on a part of the ranch not accessible to visitors like us. Notice Georgia's favorite object to paint, Pedernal, in the background.

When an aged Pack couldn't sell the ranch to someone who would preserve it in the way he envisioned, he donated it in 1955 to The Presbyterian Church, which uses the ranch as an educational and retreat center. More than 300 classes are offered on the ranch.

While it was still a guest ranch under Pack, Georgia O'Keeffe began to visit and stayed in this casita, starting in 1936:

Tim at Georgia's first "home" on the ranch.

Georgia fell in love with the land and had been splitting her time between New York, where she lived with her philandering husband Arthur Stieglitz, a famous photographer, and New Mexico. She loved having "alone time," which Ghost Ranch provided. She painted this picture of Ghost Ranch.

One thing Pack shared with Georgia was a philandering spouse. When his wife left him for an archeologist who had been studying on the ranch, he moved his family to the Ghost Ranch headquarters, which visitors can walk through.

Ghost Ranch headquarters.

In 1940, Georgia eagerly jumped at the chance to buy Rancho de los Burros from Pack along with 7 acres. This home remains with the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which has not yet made it available for the public to tour although visitors can see a bit of it from one of the available tours of the ranch.

Another view of Rancho de los Burros, Georgia's Ghost Ranch home.

This is Georgia climbing the ladder of Rancho de los Burros, her Ghost Ranch home. She would use this home in spring and summer to get away from the gardening and other chores in Abiquiu so she could focus on painting. From this place, she could easily see Pedernal, which she continued to paint again and again.

This painting is called The House I Live In, 1937, oil on canvas, 14 x 30, now in a private collection in New Haven Connecticut.

This one is called Pedernal - from Ranch #1, 1956, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 40.5 inches, in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. When she came to New Mexico, she began to collect the bones she found in the desert. This looks like one of her pelvic bone pieces.

At some point, Georgia created the logo for Ghost Ranch:

There is another famous landform on the ranch called Chimney Rock. This is how we saw it through our camera lens:

This is how Georgia saw it with her paint brush: The Cliff Chimneys, which is owned by the Milwaukee Art Museum.

This is me with the Chimney Rock way in the background. It was sunny that day but fairly cold. We didn't stay outside too long.

Georgia wasn't the only one to own a private home on Ghost Ranch. This was the home of Robert Wood Johnson of Johnson & Johnson, the company currently being sued over its baby powder that allegedly causes cancer in women.

Today, the home houses Ghost Ranch's library, open 24 hours a day for guests and area residents, with apartments above the main floor library. We met the librarian Maureen Fitzgibbon and talked with her for some time. She gave us a great tip about eating at Angelina's in Espanolo...great sopapillas. Maureen is a retired nurse who first visited Ghost Ranch, became a volunteer, and then became the librarian.

Maureen says she keeps the card catalog around for "nostalgia." The books are cataloged using Follett Destiny -- of course, I asked! While the nonfiction is classified by Library of Congress, she recently reorganized the fiction alphabetically by author. She has no e-books and doesn't recall anyone ever asking about them. She does find that many of the ranch staff like audiobooks because they commute to the ranch from all around including Santa Fe.

Visit the library online at https://www.ghostranch.org/explore/library/

A screenshot from a search of Ghost Ranch's library catalog for books about Ghost Ranch.

There are some tours of the ranch available but while we were interested in the horseback tour, it was rainy, cool, and windy so we passed ... this time. For some of the tours that are available at Ghost Ranch, check out https://www.ghostranch.org/visit/tours-trail-rides/okeeffe-tours/

I want to go back and do them all as well as attend a retreat.

For other books about Ghost Ranch, try these: 

Georgia O'Keeffe and her houses : Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Agapita Judy Lopez.

Georgia O'Keeffe at ghost ranch : a photo-essay by John Loengard.

Ghost Ranch and the faraway nearby photographs by Craig Varjabedian ; essays by Marin Sardy ... [et al.] ; introduction by Jay Packer ; afterword by Georgia O'Keeffe.

I know I'm going to try to find them.