Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center

Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center Review

The Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center, open to the public year-round, is busiest in summer, when the majority of workshops take place. Subjects range from poetry and literary arts to photography, horseback riding, and every conceivable traditional craft of northern New Mexico. These courses are open to the public, and guests camp or stay in semirustic cottages or casitas. If you're here for a day trip, after registering at the main office, you may come in and hike high among the wind-hewn rocks so beloved by O'Keeffe. The Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology contains Native American tools, pottery, and other artifacts excavated from the Ghost Ranch Gallina digs. Pioneer anthropologist Florence Hawley Ellis conducted excavations at Chaco Canyon and at other sites in New Mexico. Adjacent to the Ellis Museum, the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology exhibits the New Mexico state fossil, the Coelophysis, also known as the littlest dinosaur (it was about 7 to 9 feet long), originally excavated near Ghost Ranch. For the art lover, or the lover of the New Mexican landscape, Ghost Ranch offers guided O'Keeffe & Ghost Ranch Landscape Tours of the specific sites on the ranch that O'Keeffe painted during the five decades that she summered here. Her original house is not part of the tour and is closed to the public. These one-hour tours are available mid-March through mid-October, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at 1:30 and 3; the cost is $25, and you must call first to make a reservation. The landscape tours are timed to coincide with the tours given at her house in Abiquiu, although they have nothing to do with the O'Keeffe studio tours offered there. Here's a little-known tidbit: limited camping is available on Ghost Ranch for both RVs and tents ($16-$26) and full hookups are available for RVs.

The Ghost Ranch Piedra Lumbre Education and Visitor Center, which is part of the Ghost Ranch organization has a gallery with rotating art presentations, exhibits on New Mexico's natural history, a gift shop, and two museums. U.S. 84, just north of main Ghost Ranch entrance, 87510. 505/685-4312.