Ghost Ranch outside of Abiquiu, New Mexico was given to the Presbyterian Church by Arthur Pack. He had a trailer house on the ranch but spent much of his time in Tucson, Arizona. My Mother and Dad were hired to go and help get things built and the dining room up and running. On the gate into the ranch was a metal replica of a painting by Georgia O'Keefe.
They moved from Waco to Ghost Ranch in the fall of 1958. We were on our way to Colorado that December and stopped for Christmas with my folks. They had a small house just outside the big alfalfa field. In the evening the deer would come down from the hills and feed and sleep in the field. It was rather exciting to us and our children to see them come.
Behind .the house was an arroyo. It could be very dry at times, but if there was any rain around, you needed to be very careful and not get too close. They would fill with water rushing down from all sides and hills. We learned that the ranch hands often sent groups into the hills to help rescue people who were trapped and couldn't get back to the ranch. They would go out for a hike and then it might rain a little, but the flood that followed took it's toll.
Mother and several other women had gone into town and when they came back it either was raining or had rained. There was a bridge over the arroyo and just after they crossed the bridge, it collapsed because of the high water. They were glad the bridge didn't fall in when they were on it. A new and stronger one was soon built.
Mother was a consultant on the design of the kitchen. On it's completion she managed the dining staff and planned the menus and supervised the serving of 3 meals a day to campers, sometimes up to 300 people or more.
One time on a visit a man (I think his nickname was T. Bone) from the Board of Christian Education (which supervised the whole operation) was building a teepee village. He and a crew were stripping the bark from some tall tree trunks. Ken (our oldest son) had the privilege of helping do some of the stripping.
One day Irvin decided to take the kids up the face of Chimney Rock. There are lots of formations called Chimney Rock in the Rocky Mountains. We got part way up but the altitude was a bit much for me, so I decided to wait part way up. After quite a while Irvin and the kids came back. They had gone up pretty far and Irvin realized that they couldn't really walk back down, so he told the kids (I'm not sure if John was with them) to sit down and dig in their heels and slide down until they got to a less steep slant. That night Dad told us about the trail up the back side which was rather easy to hike. We used that one from then on.
Dad took endless pictures of the area, but the film was not so good in those days, and many of the pictures are faded. One of the ranch horses had twins one year. They were named Abi and Que.
We made many trips to the ranch when we lived in Cortez and the folks came to see us often also. It was nice to be so close. We would often go on to see other relatives. As we came back from Mississippi one time, John was getting all stuffed up in his head. When we got to Ghost Ranch he went in the pool and he made a fast recovery!
Mother and Dad would come to see us in Cortez, and on one return trip, they had an accident on the way home. I don't remember if it was summer or winter, but the car went off the road and Mother got a broken collar bone. For some reason the road was slick and the car slid.
As we passed that spot many times I was amazed that the car hadn't gone way down an embankment. I couldn't find a spot that looked wide enough the keep the car on the side of the road. After that trip Dad always took a hundred pound bag of pinto beans back to the ranch. They could always use beans at the dining room!
After everything was built, Dad worked on the bookkeeping end of the business and that went on until Jim Hall was hired as manager and Dad and Mother retired in 1962. They moved to Santa Fe and became very active in the First Presbyterian Church there.
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