The New Buildings - The Barn, Etc.

The Barn, Etc.

I guess "etc." is really just the outhouse.  We wanted to build an old-fashioned outhouse when we built the cabin, but it turns out that outhouses are illegal in Huerfano County.  So we built a structure that looks like an outhouse and put a chemical, camping toilet in it.  Since we mostly just used the cabin on weekends, it worked well enough and didn't use much water. 

It's pretty weathered now and needs some repairs and a coat of paint.  The cabin needs work as well.  Hopefully we can get to it in the spring.

Below are some pictures of the new 4-stall barn we have built.   Each stall has an exterior shed and run, so we can actually keep up to 8 horses here.  There is a wash bay that we currrently use as a human shower.  The horses get bathed outside.  We have a washer, dryer and refrigerator off the wash bay which are also for human use at the moment and a barn office that we currently stay in when we are down on the land.  The office has a composting toilet.

The barn has a freshwater system, a rainwater system and a gray water system piped in the floor.  We do not have the gutters or cistern for the rainwater system set up yet, nor are we saving and recycling gray water.  These are planned and hopefully will go in soon. 

 

Below are the two office doors.  One is on the south side of the exterior of the barn and the other is from the main part of the barn into the office.

The photos below show the interior of the barn office the way it is now set up as a small apartment with a sleeping loft.  The sofa and chair also make into beds for visitors when they come.

Below are the stalls from the inside.

And the wash bay with appliances...

And last but not least, the unfinished tack room with its own little wood stove which will double as more private guest quarters when it is done.

The Historic Ruins - Spanish Walls and an American Barn

Spanish walls and an American Barn

Along side the ancient Apishipa ruins are the ruins of a Spanish "sheep herder" cabin that could date from as far back as the 17th Century.  The Spanish settlers, whether they were herding sheep or not, took apart some of the beautiful ancient rubble-filled walls and used the stone to construct higher, less artful walls using only one course of stone.   Some of our neighbors have fully in-tact cabins dating from this period, with the timber roofs and doors missing.  We have only partial walls because later American settlers occupied our land and again, used the stone to construct early twentieth century structures. 

The Wilson family moved onto this land in the late nineteenth or more probably, early twentieth century.  They prospered here, cutting timber and truck farming, selling their produce in Pueblo and other more urban population centers.  They built a house on top of the Apishipa foundation that we used for our cabin, dug a well, and built a large barn using the ancient stone from the archeological site.  One of our neighbors has a photograph of the old Wilson house when they were still living in it.  It went up two stories from the top of the stone walls.  What is now our cabin was their cellar.  All went well for them until the 1930's when the well went dry and they were forced to move off of this land.  Some of their descendants still live in the town of Walsenburg.  The place was named "Wilson's Crossing" after them.  Below is a photograph of what is left of their barn.  They left behind the shell of an old Model T truck and a lot of farm debris which suggested that they kept poultry and  hogs as well as cattle.

The Archeological Ruins - A Cave, Walls and a House

A Cave, Walls and a House

In the ravine, about three quarters of the way from the floor of the canyon to the rim, there is a cave.  It has been declared an archeological site by the state archeological office. It is listed as an Apishipa site and it is typical of such cave sites in eastern Colorado and western Oklahoma.  It faces south, as they almost always do, has a spring at the entrance and a smoke hole at the rear of the cave.  There are matates in the living rock of the cave.  But there is eveidence of much older use as well, I think.  There are petroglyphs, of the dot and ring sort that are found in paleolithic sites. 

There is a natural amphitheater in the rock above the cave and it was renowned locally as a place to find arrowheads.  They have been pretty well mined out by now, but we still find scrapers and lithics and the occasional broken mano.   The state archeologists who surveyed the cave in the 1970's did not look anywhere on the property except the cave, and they missed a lot.  On the rim there are beautiful standing masonry walls that are also Apishipa.  I took photos into the state archeology office and they identified them and added them to the file.

There is and in-tact Apishipa building, a one-room dwelling with a storage room on the east side, that the state archeologists identified as Apisipa. It is made of both living rock and beautiful, rubble-filled masonry walls. In the early twentieth century it was used by American setters as the foundation for their house.  Because of this modern use, the state archeologists approved our plans to use it as a camping cabin, which we have done.  We did this without disturbing the existing masonry construction at all.  We simply anchored the roof to a concrete footing that sits on top of the masonry and living rock walls, held by gravity.

This is an amazingly cool space in the summer and delightfully warm in the winter.  Things that we left in the cabin during the winter never froze, because the floor and the back walls are living rock.  And in the summer, if we closed it in the morning, it would stay at least 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature during the heat of the day.  It is believed that the people who built this had a portable roof system that they brought with them when they stayed here and took away with them when they left.  It was a seasonal dwelling that was probably used in the spring, when crops would be planted in the canyon, and again in the fall when it was time to harvest.  The cabin is comfortable for us all year round. 

The Apishipa and Antelope people lived in this area and further east in what is now Texas and Oklahoma at the same time as the Ancient Puebloans were living in the Four Corners area.  They disappeared at about the same time as the Ancient Puebloans, around 1200 AD,  for reasons that are not fully understood.  It was a century of persistent drought in the area, but there were probably other factors as well.

If anyone reading this has more unformation on these ruins, or information on the Apishipa or Antelope cultures, I would love to find out all that I can.   A chapter of the Pueblo Archeological Society came out for a visit and some of the experts in that group thought our ruins had been mis-identified as Apishipa, and that they are actually Antelope.  The woman I spoke to at the Denver state archeology office did her doctoral research on the Apishipa and she seemed quite sure that they were Apishipa.  But things change in archeology, I know, as new information is discovered. 

The Middle of Nowhere

The Middle of Nowhere

I thought about making this another section of the Little Farm Blog, but after I thought about all there was to tell - potentially - I decided that the ranch needed it's own page. 

The story of the ranch began before the story of the farm.  The story of the ranch began before we had horses, before I had retired, and while we were still living in the inner city.  It was ten years ago.  Our children were grown and out of the nest.  We were each working hard at our chosen careers, although mine was not my first choice.  We decided we could afford to look for a vacation place: a second place, out of the city, maybe to retire in eventually.  So we began our search.  We looked in the mountains and out on the plains.

This search eventually led us to a piece of property: "unimproved" ranch land only fifty miles from the New Mexico line.   It is eighty acres out on the high prairie east of the I-25 corridor.  Forty acres are on top of the canyon.  Roughly forty are in the bottom of the canyon.  And there is a six hundred foot drop from one to the other.   There is a ravine that provides access from the top to the bottom, There are three or four separate biomes.  The eastern boundary of the property adjoins BLM  land and  the canyon , itself, has been designated as a wild place.  This place stole our hearts.

But it is not an easy place.  The first few summers, when we were using it for tent camping, we had to learn a whole new skill set for surviving in the dessert in the summer.  But it is impossibly beautiful, with the front range from the Spanish Peaks to Pikes Peak in  the front yard and our canyon in the back yard. 

I will try to write about it in categories, like the Little Farm Blog.  That way you can read the parts that interest you and skip what doesn't.  We have a ten year history here, so there could be a lot to tell about the past.  Or maybe I will just log things in as we move forward, telling past stories as they come up. 

The categories, for the moment are:

The Archeological Ruins and Artifacts
The Canyon Bottom
The Canyon walls
The Historic Ruins and Artifacts
The New buildings
The People
The Prairie
The Ravine
The Rim
The River

We were down there  this past weekend.  It was the first time in  over a year for me.  We usually take horses with us as the riding is spectacular.  There is quite a bit of open range, still, on the prairie.  And the canyon loop is wonderful as well.  But we did not take them this time because we had work we needed to get done and no time to play.  I feel badly that it has been so long, because it is such a compellingly beautiful place, I miss it.

Here are a few photos from this weekend:

Above is the canyon looking north from the rim.  Below is the canyon looking south from the rim

Above is a natural amphitheater that overlooks the ravine.