It was Pack’s glowing reviews of the area that enticed Georgia O’Keeffe to visit. It was then purchased in 1936 by Arthur Pack, a wealthy American naturalist and writer who founded the American Nature Association and Nature Magazine. The new owner officially named it Ghost Ranch. In 1928, the ranch changed hands after being lost in a game of poker. Cursed or not, one brother ended up killing the other during an argument about gold, after which a group of locals arrived at the ranch and promptly hung the remaining brother from a tree. The ranch became known among locals as Rancho de los Brujos, or Ranch of the Witches. To help keep prying eyes away from their base of operations, they began to spread the rumor that the land was haunted by evil spirits (a rumor that may have dated back to the Navajo). They then set about stealing cattle and hiding them in the box canyon. These cattle-rustling brothers claimed the land and built basic cedar-and-adobe structures for their homes. Then came the Spanish settlers and, in the late 1800s, the notorious Archuleta brothers. After them came the Athabaskans, followed by their descendants, the Navajo and Apache. Around 10,000 years ago, the Paleo Indian cultures of the Chama Valley lived on the land now occupied by the ranch. Further discoveries in the last two decades have only cemented the ranch’s reputation among paleontologists worldwide.ĭinosaurs weren’t the only one to call the area home. In 1947, the paleontologist Edwin Colbert discovered more than a thousand well-preserved fossilized skeletons of a small dinosaur called Coelophysis in a quarry on the ranch. And back then, dinosaurs roamed across the area now occupied by Ghost Ranch. Take a massive leap back in time, however, and this area, along with what is now the American Southwest, was very different.Ībout 200 million years ago, it was all located close to the equator, at which time it had a warm and monsoon-like climate. Ghost Ranch is a 21,000-acre education center and retreat not far from the village of Abiquiú in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.
Its story features everything from dinosaurs to cattle rustlers, Georgia O’Keeffe and the ghost of a giant rattlesnake.
It’s hard to imagine that many ranches in New Mexico have a more varied or colorful history than Ghost Ranch.
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