Now Ghost Ranch is owned by The Presbyterian Church. It's a convention center and camp, and is open to visitors and tourists. We enjoyed the beautiful scenery on the way to the ranch, and when we got there we ate the lunch we had packed in one of the buildings pictured below.
The buildings at Ghost Ranch are nestled amidst fabulously colored plateaus.
Ghost Ranch was cold. We pulled out our coats and hats for the extremely short hike that we took. We were actually kind of glad we had an opportunity to use our coats since we had dragged them all the way to New Mexico. Below I'm bundled up and looking at Chimney Rock.
Ghost Ranch provides a view of the Pedernal, the tall, distant plateau in the pictures below.
Georgia O'Keeffe often painted the Pedernal. Here is one of the her many paintings of the mountain of which she said, "It's my private mountain. God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it."
Like good O'Keeffe fans we had to take a picture of the cow's skull that hangs at Ghost Ranch as well.
Bones were another of O'Keeffe's favorite subjects. Of them she said, "To me, they are strangely more living than the animals walking around — hair, eyes and all, with their tails switching."
Other sights from Ghost Ranch include this grazing burro.
And this old, weather-beaten log cabin.
Here's our rental car looking like its parked in the middle of nowhere.
And this is one of the desert valleys we passed on the way to and from Ghost Ranch.
When we got back to Santa Fe we rounded out our O'Keeffe day by going to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Their website has several really nice slide shows of the painting in their collection.After a short trip through the museum it was time to head to Albuquerque and the airport. That day we had breakfast in Santa Fe, lunch at Ghost Ranch, dinner in Albuquerque, and we were home for bedtime.
And that concludes my report on New Mexico.
