Black Mesa Ranch
Snowflake, Arizona, USA
Artisan Cheese
Nubian Goats
Site Navigation and Links
Cheese and
Candy Information and Online Ordering Page
Featured pages on this site
Updated!
6/07: We have revamped our Ranch Workshop Packages!
In addition to our one and three-day cheese making and goat management workshops learn about our free open- house days and lodging accommodations.
______________
Award Winning Artisan Goat Cheeses
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
____________
Click here to read the online version of Kathryn's booklet
______________
________________
____________
This site last updated:
August 26, 2008
© 2000-2008 Black Mesa Ranch Inc. All Rights Reserved
Arizona Grown!
Almost as long as Kathryn and I had been together (since 1982) we had often, when frustrated with people or a job, or a situation or with the world in general had said to one or the other “Let’s run away and be hermits together”. It got to be a running line of discussion and over the years the more we thought and talked about it the better it sounded. Eventually the joke evolved into a plan, not to be real hermits, of course, but to work hard toward trying to get onto a nice piece of country land and get away from the rat race.
We did work hard. At first as employees for other people primarily in the restaurant business, then for ourselves restoring historic properties and selling them or fixing up small apartment buildings and keeping them for rentals, and finally, again for ourselves designing and implementing, technical systems for very short term position trading stocks over the internet.
All the while we worked we continued to revise and develop our goals for the future, always with our “piece of the country” a motivating factor. Sometimes we would think of it as a business and talk about ways of maximizing production off whatever land we ended up with. Sometimes we would think REAL BIG; of a spread so large and diverse that we would hire a ranch manager to take care of the daily business and to free us up when we wanted to travel. Sometimes we would think very small planning around a tiny plot of green where we could enjoy our hobbies when we could get away.
Whenever we planned a trip we would try to drive through a different part of the country en route to see what they really looked like, always thinking about where our ideal spot might be. We found that it was pretty easy to eliminate some substantial sections of the USA because of our developing criteria. We just knew, for example, that there was no where in Minnesota that would work for us because of its climate.
Eventually we realized that we had been talking about what we liked and disliked about so many areas for so long that we actually had some fairly firm guidelines within which to work and we set about writing them down and prioritizing them as best as we could. We started by saying that we wanted to stay in the continental USA. From there our criteria divided roughly into Climate Considerations, Economic Considerations, and Political Considerations. Each of these criteria had many sub-categories. Under the Climate Category for example, we said we didn’t want anyplace too cold or too snowy in the winter, or where hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes were common, or that got so little rain it was not green at least part of the year, or that had lots of pest bugs to deal with, or that got too humid. Most of the Climatic conditions were pass-fail for our site; if any of them were wrong then the site was out. Economic Considerations included things like tax structure of the locality, cost of living, potential growth of the area (for future resale if desired) as well as access to services and shopping, medical facilities and utilities. These criteria were less crucial but could sway one site over another if there was a difference. The Political Considerations were also less crucial than the Climatic ones but still important to us. We wanted to be in a fairly conservative environment where there was minimal government interference with individuals but not a “redneck” place. We value our right to keep and bear arms so fair gun control regulations in the area was an important consideration. One other major consideration we had that didn’t really fit into any category was our need for the land to be "interesting". This is a very subjective condition and while there are surely people who find the great plains interesting, or vast deserts interesting we are not among them. We wanted a place that was topographically interesting. Maybe some craggy rocks, or a river, or a huge gully, or some fantastic rock formations, or a mountain, or something. This was going to be a tough one to describe to a realtor, but we’d know it when we saw it.
Our next step was the purchase of numerous maps and books to help us eliminate large sections of the country that did not meet our criteria. We took huge laminated USA maps and marked out whole sections; The deep south because of humidity, The far north because of their winters, large parts of the East Coast and California too because of the economic and/or political climates, A big chunk out of the center of the country know as “Tornado Alley”, etc., etc. Some of the areas we ended up marking off were very disappointing to us, areas we had liked in our travels that now didn’t really fit what we were trying to find. We vowed that if we didn’t find our place we would have to loosen our criteria and re-examine those areas.
One of the things we found was that the country’s Southwest seemed pretty good based on most of our conditions. We were living in Tucson, AZ at this time and really liked the state for many reasons, not the least of which was that we were already familiar with much about it. We decided that we would like to stay in Arizona if at all possible but we knew that the biggest challenge to our search would be to find an acceptable climactic area. AZ is a big state with an incredibly diverse set of regional climates. One of the things we found is that much can be told about the weather in an area in AZ by the elevation of that area. This prompted us to get yet another map. This one a large laminated topographical map just of the state. We proceded to mark the map along topographical lines, calling all places above 6000’ too high (too cold) and below 4500’ too low (too hot). This eliminated a good portion of the state. We next eliminated all public and Indian lands and some sections that were obviously topographically uninteresting. Most of the state was now hatched out, leaving a rough diagonal band across the middle along the Mogollon Rim, a section in the extreme southeast of the state around the Chiricahua Mountains, and a few isolated islands of highlands, mostly across the center of the state.
We now began planning trips around the State and began researching the real estate offerings in earnest on the Internet. We traveled in our small RV with 3 dogs (and later 4 dogs) on routes that came the closest to passing through the areas our map told us were possibilities. Sometimes there would be potential sites on the routes we took that had been offered for sale and we would try to visit as many as possible to see what they were like, even if we had already dismissed the area for one reason or another.
One important thing seemed clear: as technological advances continued we became more and more convinced that we might actually be able to get our little piece of the country, out in the middle of practically nowhere and continue to make a living via the internet (we were actively trading stocks online at this time).
Click here to continue with Part 2: Eliminating Some Possibilities