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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Endorsed by more than 36 humane organizations, the Certified Humane Raised and Handled® program is nationally recognized as the Gold Standard for certifying animal welfare.
Arizona Grown!
After our disappointments with the properties near Williams and in the Chiricahuas, once again it was back to the Internet search. I found an on-line ad for a piece of property between Holbrook and Show Low. It was technically just out of the area we had marked on our maps as OK to look in (we had it marked as "too high in elevation and uninteresting") but this isn’t an exact science and the description sounded pretty good.
I contacted the owner and he sent a video tape he had shot of the property. Despite his best efforts to show off the place’s best features it most definitely was uninteresting (to us), a high plains mesa location with a few rolling hills, no trees to speak of and a couple of very peculiar structures. We knew this property wasn’t for us but there did seem to be some potential for interesting “micro areas” within that part of the map we had discounted outright. We started doing some concentrated research on that part of Arizona. There were amazing differences in the weather reported by towns geographically nearby. Towns as close a 18 miles apart reported as much as 24” difference in monthly snowfall on average.
Further Internet research found another interesting property. The pictures were, again, very nice and interesting showing a picturesque windmill with a mesa close in the background, a newer looking metal barn, and an old corral. I contacted the realtor, Bea who worked out of an office in Show Low. She said the property was 240 acres and also had a couple of unfinished houses (but they were in such poor shape that the owners were not assigning them any value in their pricing of the property). She gave us map grids and directions (it was within a few dozen miles of the property we had just seen the video of - not a good sign). She said that there were several other properties up there that we might be interested in too. We figured “What the heck” and decided to go up and look at the two properties plus some others on a day the following week and made an appointment with Bea.
Before going up we used the information Bea had given us to locate the property as best as we could on some topography mapping software I had purchased expressly for property hunting. It incorporates every 7 ½ USGS map for an area seamlessly with GPS interfacing (a very cool tool for finding property corners and the like). If we had figured out the right place, it looked, if anything, even more interesting on the topo map. Nuzzled in the crook of an arm of Black Mesa the map even showed what could have been 2 houses and a barn just up off the valley floor looking out past a very large wash. Again, if we had it right, the topography looked stunning. As best as we could figure, a 240 acre parcel that included the structures we saw should also include a big part of the wash, a cattle tank and might even go well up the side of the mesa! We had been disappointed before and tried to withhold our excitement but my hopes were getting high once again.
The route we chose to come up from Tucson took us through Payson, Heber and into Snowflake where we picked up on the directions to both properties. Hope faded as we passed mile after mile of high dessert nothingness. The closer we got to Snowflake all we could think of was that video of the first area property - situated so it could have just as easily been in southeast Colorado as Arizona (boring-boring!).
Snowflake itself was a very pretty little town with much obvious civic pride and reinvestment but as we left town on Concho “Highway” the cuteness faded quickly and the desert plains look returned. We decided to go to the video property first just to see if it was as hopeless as we feared. Following the convoluted directions (we later figured out they were to keep prospective buyers as far from the local pig farms as possible) we found the property. Film may, on occasion, lie but this time it was starkly realistic. We drove onto the property briefly and just far enough to quickly turn around and leave, not wanting to have to endure a “showing” of the property by the resident.
Our appointment with Bea was for the next morning but we were making very good time (since there was nothing to look at) so had time to find the other property (and maybe cross it off our list too) before finding a place to camp for the night.
We headed back toward Snowflake on Concho for a little way before finding the turn-off onto the dirt road she had described. The road was very rough and the little RV did not handle it particularly well. At one point at the base of a short but very steep section (we later learned this was "Calamity Hill") we had to stop and get out to reconnoiter the other side of the hill, not knowing if it just dropped off or what (it turned out to be a flat mesa top) before going on. 4 miles on that road we found the turnoff onto the secondary dirt road as she had directed. We were going about 10 mph but the last miles seemed to go even slower. When we had asked Bea if we could get to the property in our small RV she had hesitated but said “Yes I think so…" but then amended it with a "Well maybe not all the way, there’s a pretty big wash you may have trouble with”. We found the wash alright and she was correct. We WOULD have had trouble with it if we’d decided to try it. We pulled the RV off to the side of the road which didn’t look as though anybody had driven on it in ages and took our first real look at the property…It was magnificent!
Please click this link to read more of this story with "Our First Impressions of the Ranch"