At Ghost Ranch, visitors can walk in the footsteps of Georgia O’Keeffe and find inspiration in the land, its history, and the teachers who share their knowledge.
On a summer Saturday morning, I join scores of visitors anxiously pouring into Ghost Ranch, the northern New Mexico retreat and artistic muse of American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
It’s my first time at the 21,000-acre Abiquiu property, where I’m immediately struck by its towering rock walls, vivid colors, and vast skies. As people stream in and out of the sprawling ranch-style welcome center, they browse the weekend market of Native jewelry vendors and local artists on their way to arts and crafts classes, outdoor experiences, and tours of the ranch.
O’Keeffe lived here in different periods throughout her long life and career, finding deep inspiration in the plants, flowers, bones, hills, and mountains of the high desert. The same features O’Keeffe captured in her paintings still exist today and can best be experienced in Ghost Ranch tours ranging from the 90-minute Georgia O’Keeffe Landscape Trail Ride on horseback to the three-hour Sketch the Morning that gives artists time to paint, sketch, and photograph in the field.
I’m here for the popular Georgia O’Keeffe Landscape Tour. Julia Haywood, who works as Ghost Ranch’s tour manager, gathers our group by the bus for an introduction. “I'll be taking us out this morning on the light walk in O'Keeffe's footsteps,” she says, before ushering us inside to discuss the painter’s life.
O’Keeffe’s large flower paintings are among her best-known works, Haywood explains. “O’Keeffe said she painted those flowers so big, so that busy New Yorkers would stop and look at them.” The same zoom-in technique she employed in her flower paintings, like 1936’s Jimson Weed—which gives viewers a close-up perspective of the painting’s subject matter—can also be found in many of the modernist’s Ghost Ranch landscape paintings.
Our sold-out tour bus rambles along the old Ghost Ranch entrance road for a couple of miles, before pulling off to the side. We pile out into the desert wilderness, and Haywood points behind her to a reddish-purple rock formation on the horizon. We’re standing in the same spot O’Keeffe did when she painted 1934’s Lavender Hill Forms. She holds up a print of the painting beside the formation for comparison: “The earth on these lower forms is siltstone and mudstone, and it contains different iron oxides and minerals. It's the iron oxides and minerals that account for all the beautiful colors.”
After hiking down a gravel road, Haywood shows us the traditional U-shaped hacienda-style adobe where O’Keeffe lived. These days, the delicate, historic building is mostly closed to visitors, except for the occasional event. The 1937 painting The House Where I Live shows the home framed by one of O’Keeffe’s favorite subjects, the mountaintop mesa Cerro Pedernal, which gained its unique shape due to ancient volcanic activity.
After the tour, I sit down with Haywood in her office, surrounded by bookshelves crammed with tomes on art history, geography, and local archeology, to learn more about the ranch and the activities at the retreat and educational center. Owned by the Presbyterian Church and run by a nonprofit, Ghost Ranch offers everything from spiritual retreats to paleontology classes.
Classes and workshops include silversmithing, weaving, beading, pottery and ceramics, drawing, painting, and pastel. Guests can stay overnight with lodging options including one- and two-bedroom historic cottages, bunkhouse-style ranch accommodations, and RV and tent camping.
A $10 day pass offers access to the ranch’s extensive hiking trails, as well as its two museums, the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology and the Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology. But many guests come exclusively for the Ghost Ranch tours, including the landscape, ghost, paleontology, and private tours.
Haywood describes an early and unexpected trip O’Keeffe took to New Mexico with her sister in the summer of 1917, when O’Keeffe was living and working as a teacher in Canyon, Texas. While the duo planned to visit Colorado, heavy rains and flooding diverted their route. “They had to come around and up by train almost the entire length of New Mexico, stopping off for a night in Santa Fe, both on their way up and on their way back,” she says. O’Keeffe later wrote to her friend, photographer Paul Strand, about the trip and the vastness of New Mexico’s landscape. “She told him and many other friends, ‘From then on, I was always on my way back.”
