Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch

Georgia O'Keeffe first came to New Mexico in the late 1920s and was drawn back to the Abiquiu country for the rest of her long life. She rented and later bought a house at Ghost Ranch, and in the 1940s acquired and restored a ruined hacienda in the village of Abiquiu, keeping both. The flat-topped mesa she could see from Ghost Ranch, the Pedernal, appears in painting after painting, and she once said God told her that if she painted it enough, she could have it.

The cliffs, the sun-bleached animal bones, the smooth river stones, and the wide skies of this valley became the subject of some of the most recognizable American paintings of the twentieth century. Today her Abiquiu home and studio are preserved much as she left them and can be toured by reservation, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe holds the largest collection of her work.

The banded cliffs at Ghost Ranch are a stack of sediments laid down over many millions of years, red and maroon mudstones from ancient floodplains, pale bands of gypsum and sandstone, all tilted and weathered into the shapes that catch the light so dramatically. The colors are the reason the place is sometimes called a painter's palette turned to stone.

Those same layers made Ghost Ranch one of the most important fossil sites in the world. In the 1940s paleontologists uncovered a dense bone bed of Coelophysis, a slender, fast early dinosaur, along with remains of other ancient reptiles from the dawn of the dinosaur age. The ranch keeps two small museums that tell the story of the digs and the deep history written into the rock.

Abiquiu grew up as a frontier settlement in Spanish-colonial New Mexico, and it became a Genizaro community, a place settled by people of Native descent who had been captured, ransomed, or detribalized and then given land in exchange for defending the frontier. Their descendants still farm the valley, tend the acequias, or shared irrigation ditches, and gather at the old plaza church. It is a living heritage, not a museum piece.

A short distance up the valley, the small village of Chimayo and the Rio Grande gorge country lie within reach, and the whole northern region is threaded with the acequia farms, moradas, and adobe churches of Hispano New Mexico. Travelers are welcome, but much of Abiquiu is private and residential, so it rewards a quiet, respectful pace.

Ghost Ranch keeps a set of well-loved trails. The Chimney Rock trail climbs to a viewpoint over the whole striped valley, and the Kitchen Mesa route works up through the cliff bands to the top. Nearby, Abiquiu Lake, held back by a dam on the Rio Chama, offers cool blue water, boating, and fishing against a backdrop of red rock, and the lower Chama is a favorite for float trips through the canyon.

Spring and fall are the kindest seasons, mild and clear, with cottonwoods along the river turning gold in autumn. Summer days are hot and bright, with monsoon thunderstorms building in the afternoons that can bring flash floods to the arroyos. Winter is cold and quiet, and a dusting of snow on the red cliffs is a sight worth the chill.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.