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| Front gate, Little Boquillas Ranch |
"Two miles in, two miles out," the Husband Person told me. Lately I've been making an effort at learning the techniques used by the Urban Sketch artists - on site, quick, drawings and paintings that capture the feel and essence of a place, rather than photographic detail - and so I've been packing my art supplies to local ghost towns, plunking my butt down on sticker patches and rocks, and doing some hasty sketching. Our destination was to be the headquarters of the vast Little Boquillas Ranch, with an easy flat (but not level) hike in along the railroad bed. I loaded up my day pack with plenty of water - a few bottles for me and my problematic kidneys, and enough to rinse my brushes - and far too much art paper, paints, and watercolor pencils for this particular mission. Add the other essentials - pencil sharpener, graphite pencils, a towel, some trail mix, and so on - and my pack was now about 25 pounds. No problem for a four mile hike. I looked forward to some quiet outdoors art time while HP hiked off farther to some more remote points of interest.
But the "two miles in, two miles out" turned out to be a total of 5.4 miles. I'm not sure I like new math! Still, no problem ... except the pack I chose to load my art supplies in did not have a waist band. This little oversight turned an otherwise-easy hike into thousands of steps of misery.
We hiked the railroad bed in, stopping at the old gathering pen and loading chute and the boiler shed near the trailhead first. The railroad bed was mercifully easy to hike, not as deep in the slag track ballast as many abandoned tracks, and sloped gently upwards toward the ranch headquarters. Still, it was 3.1 miles of gentle upwards slope via the tracks. Along the way, where the tracks are closest to the actual trail (which it parallels, for the most part), we encountered a rider on a green horse moving briskly back towards the trailhead. As we reached the ranch gates at Little Boquillas, we met the rest of the riders, one on foot holding a badly injured horse. Their friend had ridden in haste to try to get help and bring the trailer back to pick up the badly lacerated animal. They'd run into some concealed barbed wire. Should you do this otherwise-beautiful ride, keep your eyes open. I didn't find the exact site of the guilty wire, so can't give you more specific detail - just know it's there, lurking, waiting to cause your horse some major grief.
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| The railroad bed |
By the time we reached the ranch house, I wished I was on my mule - or that I'd had my little pack donkey along to carry my gear. The hike was pleasant, but I am vintage. There were plenty of places to hitch livestock and it would have been an easy ride.
The historic Little Boquillas Ranch is well preserved for a vacant ranch, with a pair of residential buildings and several outbuildings. Purchased by George Hearst (William Randolph Hearst's father) in 1880, it was originally part of the 1833 San Juan de las Boquillas and Nogales land grant and, of course, still part of Mexico until the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. Long before that, though, it was occupied by the Sobaipuri tribe. By the time Father Kino visited the nearby village of Quiburi in 1696, over 2,000 Sobaipuri resided there. In 1912, the Boquillas outfit bought out the former Greene cattle company in its entirety, including 17,475 acres of land, 2000 head of cattle, 162 dairy cattle, 153 horses and mules, and sundry other essentials to operating the ranch - all for $175,000. This merger made the Boquillas cattle company the largest range and land holding in the entire newly-minted state.
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| The smokehouse, with ranch house in background |
I was thrilled to see the buildings still gracing the property and decided the lovely red brick ranch house would be my first sketch. After touring the large red barn, the blacksmith shop, and poking around the corrals, the smokehouse, and the foreman's house, I sat on a concrete slab with a good view of the ranch house and started to organize my art gear. Out came the watercolor paper, the brushes, the pencil ... and then I realized Husband Person hadn't vanished as planned. "Where are you heading off to?" I asked. "Just walking around here," he said, "It'll take an hour to get back and we'd better start now." Back went the art gear into my backpack. With my sore feet and screaming hips (thanks to a pinched nerve), I might be forgiven for momentarily comparing myself to climbers who travel to Everest and never make it farther than base camp. Without so much as a pencil mark on paper to show for it, we started back.
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| The old barn at Little Boquillas |
I did, however, get plenty of photographs to show for it. Next time, we start out earlier ... perhaps with pack donkey.
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| Scary movie! The interior of the smokehouse has plenty of meat hooks to inspire the imagination. |
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| Meathooks! Beef (this WAS a cattle company, after all) would hang here to cure. |
The wood barn, remarkably intact for its age, was likely present prior by 1910. Large and roomy, it featured a lengthy manger that allowed ranch hands to feed livestock from the inside of the barn.
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| The barn |
Thankfully, the interior of the barn and other outbuildings still contain old relics and have not been completely looted or destroyed.
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| Old fittings within the barn work area. |
The blacksmith shop is a gem of old adobe walls, the mud bricks exposed through the weathered stucco exterior.
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| The blacksmith shop |
Beside the red brick ranch house is the foreman's house, of wood construction.
The brick ranch house has an interesting floor plan, much more complex than it would appear from the front.
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| Rear of the brick ranch house. |
On the way back, we stuck to the Boquillas trail, measuring a merciful 2.3 miles of gently sloping downhill terrain. Shorter in part because we didn't explore the boiler shed again, and because I didn't include the roaming-around-the-ranch-buildings leg of the trip, it was pleasant but decidedly less interesting than the railroad bed. The abandoned tracks had crossings over washes and a few ruins of old structures and a couple of lazy javelina. The designated trail, though, had good sandy footing and ... vulture feathers stuck to a power pole, so there's that.
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The return path |
