Black Mesa Ranch
Snowflake, Arizona, USA
Artisan Cheese
Nubian Goats
Cheese and Candy Information and Online Ordering Page
Featured pages on this site
Updated!
We have revamped our Ranch Workshop Packages!
In addition to our three-day cheese making and goat management workshops learn about our free open- house days and lodging accommodations.
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Award Winning Artisan Goat Cheeses
2 Awards 2008 ADGA National Competition
4 Awards 2005 ADGA National Competition
3 Awards 2004 ADGA National Competition
(available seasonally)
2 Awards 2005 ADGA National Competition
2 Awards 2004 ADGA National Competition
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Click here to read the online version of Kathryn's booklet
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This site last updated:
August 27, 2010
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Arizona Grown!
After maneuvering the RV as close to the property's entrance as possible (still 1/4 mile away) we took in the vista. From our vantage point on the far side of the wash from the mesa we could see a large metal building, a windmill turning high on a tower near a couple of metal storage tanks and could just make out 2 small gray buildings, one with the glint of a vehicle windshield in front of it. The wash (we later learned it was named “Hay Hollow Draw”) was really big, maybe 30 or 40 feet across. It was dry but very sandy at the road crossing that looked unused for some time and it had some pretty steep banks. The barbed wire fence where we had pulled off was down for the 50 feet to the big wash and for at least that far on the other side. There were numerous cattle to be seen in the vicinity.
We decided to take the dogs for a brief walk along the side of the draw away from the houses that were still a good ¾ of a mile away. The dogs had other ideas. They immediately dashed into the wash and found a big mud hole left from a recent rain and proceeded to have a great time while making a huge mess of themselves. We joined them in the draw and took a long walk down the bed, stopping periodically to let the dogs romp in the numerous puddles and small swimming holes they found. The wash runs quite deep through here with banks up to 15 feet high on both sides.
After a while we decided to climb the house-side bank to get our bearings. We found that we were nearly due West of the houses, and maybe ¼ mile away, and we could see them much clearer now. They looked pretty much abandoned and it seemed like maybe the car had a couple of flat tires.
Chancing that there was nobody home we walked toward the houses eventually joining in with a long-unused and un-maintained road that was the driveway which we followed to the South house. As we approached it became very clear that no one had lived here for quite some time. Aside from the fact that the road was virtually impassable and unused, many of the windows in the houses were broken out and the obviously abandoned orchards were filled with acres of the dead skeletons of trees large enough to have been beginning to bear fruit before they had died.
The light was fading fast so we headed back to the RV without too much exploration and made camp right were we had parked. The evening was marvelously cool for mid-summer and we sat out for hours talking about possibilities.
After a quick walk on the property the next morning we headed off to meet with the realtor, Bea, who was to show us this property and some others. She showed up with husband Ernie and another couple who were interested in seeing the ranch. Over the course of our conversations with Bea and Ernie we learned that the property had been on the market with a series of realtors for over 10 years. Ernie, who used to be a realtor had it listed first and said that there had been one or two offers to purchase it while he had it. One had gotten as far as almost closing but the buyers had not been able to come up with the cash they needed and had forfeited their earnest money and walked away. Another couple of realtors had had the property for a while and Ernie thought there might have been another offer during that time but nothing came of it for some reason. Bea had gotten the listing fairly recently, just a few months ago and it was currently listed at a lower price than what the contract had been for when Ernie had the listing. We also learned that there were several owners all of whom lived in the Phoenix area who had tried to do a communal development or make some kind of co-op venture in the 1980’s. No one seemed to be able to tell us why they had given up on the property.
Our viewing of the property that day and further investigations revealed the following:
The best structure on the property was the barn. Actually a 40x50’ steel machine shed with 2 overhead garage doors and decent wiring for a shop. It used to have solar panels and an inverter and batteries to supply power but the panels and controls had been stolen and the batteries were long gone due to neglect. It is about chock-full of general crap including a bunch of nasty furniture.
The two houses were 2 story (1st level 2/3 underground) basic rectangle in shape and of concrete block construction with no ornamentation. Kathryn called it “Soviet Block Construction”. In fact neither house had ever been finished, each being at some stage of the sheet-rocking phase of construction, though it was clear that both had been lived in from the horrid furniture still there. The North house was somewhat less finished than the South but both had a very similar floor plan with some minor variations. Each house was about 1800 sq. ft and had 2 bathrooms and 2-3 bedrooms and each was adorned with a hideously added and poorly constructed mudroom/entryway to the south side. Both featured a front door suspended in mid air about 5’ off the ground on its West side and both were completely infested with pack rats who had made a huge filthy mess of every nook and cranny of the places.
The Power House was empty of its equipment and the overhead wires from it to the houses had fallen to the ground. There was also a Chicken Coop in serious need of repair and a concrete slab near the North end of the property with some fencing that may have been the site for a hay barn or stable at one time.
The well, windmill and pump house were located up the hill from the barn. An old pump jack with a newer looking gasoline engine was in evidence. The 2 steel tanks (we were told they are 2500 gallons) were high on an I-beam and railroad tie tower maybe 30’ up and looked pretty rough and rusty.
The land itself was most interesting. The 240 acres is 6, 40-acre+/- parcels irregularly arranged. Imagine 5 squares making a plus sign then fill the bottom left open corner with a 6th square. With North being up that is roughly the shape of the property, though none of the parcels are actually square. All of the surveyed parcels in this area have angled sides making them more like parallelograms. Anyway if you look at your augmented plus sign both the top square and the far right square are parcels that on this property climb steeply up the sides of Black Mesa as it wraps itself around the property.
Hay Hollow Draw, the big wash, runs in a rough arc from the lowest edge of the bottom square in the plus sign through the center square and out through the top of the left square of the plus.
Generally speaking, the land is flat, grassy pasture to the South and West of the wash and slopes up gently, thickly dotted with Juniper and Cedar trees, to the base of the mesa to the North and East of the wash. The slope up the mesa sides (which are covered with gorgeous black lava rocks) is generally quite steep and takes up about 1/3 of the squares described above.
The property is almost completely fenced (though some is in need of repair) with the exception of the steepest and highest parts of the perimeter of the parcel that is the right side square of the plus sign.
There was also the remnant of a 5-acre orchard behind the barn. All the fruit trees were long dead but there is a complex irrigation system in place with lots of dials, filters, gauges and valves leading to bubbler heads for each tree. There are many internal fenced areas and sections of fencing that will take a significant amount of time to decipher the uses of and/or needs for. There were a couple of apparent garden areas, the largest is about an acre, fenced with a variety of fencing, and located between the 2 houses.
There are several good-sized washes (aside from Hay Hollow Draw) on the property, mostly channeling rainfall off the mesa to the Draw. Some of them would likely prove a challenge to plan roads around. The property was offered with a permit to dam one of the washes to create a 1-acre pond for livestock use. Aside from the main well (with the windmill and tanks) there are supposed to be 2 other very old wells on the property somewhere. There is also a dirt cattle tank on the property but even in the hardest rains we have not seen it with water in it.
Unfortunately much of the acreage around the barn and houses was positively strewn with refuse and garbage. Much of it is metal debris from heaven-knows-what, though one can sometimes identify various parts of machinery or vehicles. There were also so many pieces of loose wire thrown everywhere on the property Kathryn and I now, half jokingly, tell our friends that we spend so much time picking it up we consider our new occupation to be “Wire Wranglers”. K says that if the people who lived here had hired a full time guy to do nothing but cut up spools of wire and throw the pieces around the job couldn’t have been done more thoroughly.
As for vehicles, there were three abandoned cars on the property in various states of dismantlement. There was also what we call “The RV Park” which is a grouping of: a beat-upon silver Air Stream-style travel trailer (“The Diner”), a single-wide mobile home with many doors and windows missing and a large and completely dilapidated 20'-square steel outbuilding. The area is completed by assorted strings of electric wiring and mysterious plumbing stub-ups, some PVC hose bibs and a couple of very large and ancient LP gas tanks (one says it was built in 1944, both have gauges that are registering almost full) which we call “The Bombs”. The first photos we took of the “RV Park” look exactly like those newspaper pictures of the aftermath of a bad hurricane in Florida. Near the RV Park there were a couple of locked fuel-type hand pumps on standpipes that may be connected to underground storage tanks. We have been told that there are 2 tanks, one for gasoline and one for kerosene.
Please click here to continue the story with "Purchasing the Ranch"