Black Mesa Ranch
Snowflake, Arizona, USA
Artisan Cheese
Nubian Goats
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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.
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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
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Click here to read the online version of Kathryn's booklet
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This site last updated:
October 04, 2008
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Arizona Grown!
"Extreme Rural"
One area of the state seemed to have a great potential for us... There was a stretch of Arizona near Williams between Flagstaff and Kingman that according to the maps and books had just what we were looking for.
A search of the Internet came up with a property for sale by the owner that sounded just right. It was a square mile (640 acres) of juniper-pinion forest with a working well, generator for power, some developed roads on the property and even an unfinished house (4000 sq. ft.!), a guest house, and a large machine shed. The pictures on the Internet were wonderful looking, this really sounded like something we could work with.
We contacted the owner who really sounded like he wanted to get rid of the property and he sent us some keys to get into the buildings. We spoke at length on the phone discussing the weather there, the neighbors, the roads, why he had move out (5 years previously) and not gone back etc. One of our chief concerns (aside that his asking price was well above what we had planned on spending, but if it were PERFECT???…) was that there was no phone service there. The owner said that cell phones worked fine, but our concern was that we were currently stock trading full time using 2 DSL (very fast) internet connections to get the job done. How the heck could we continue to make a living without phones? He said that it had been a while since he had checked but phone service was planned for the area, even gave us his old contacts at the phone company to talk to.
A week or two later we arranged to go up to look at the property. Unfortunately it was in much rougher condition than we had been lead to believe. The property was inaccessible because a 30’ deep gully was where the driveway should have been, the well was pumped into an above-ground kiddie pool which had collapsed, and the generator-pump house had been ransacked and all the equipment gone. We probably could have worked with all that (at a greatly reduced price!) but the real problem was that the house and all the work we saw seemed very poorly done. In our opinion, based on years of construction experience the house was a mishmash of cobbled together components in a weird plan that we couldn’t trust to stand through the next major storm.
Things only got more dismal the next day when we went into Kingman to talk with the phone people. They called the area “extreme rural” and had no plans at all for extending service out that way for the foreseeable future. They said they could possibly hook up a radio phone to the site with a couple of repeaters (cost $20,000) but a decent Internet hook-up was out of the question. Totally scratch one property. As a matter of fact scratch another whole section of the search map. “Extreme rural” locations without the possibility of good phone service now became another crossed-out segment on our maps.
The Chiricahuas
The next section we began to pay special attention to was the area in the far south and east of the state. We had visited the Chiricahua National Monument and had camped along the Pinery Creek there several times and really liked the area. The Portal area on the other side of the mountain was also very special.
Through the Internet we found a realtor, Amy who seemed very on the ball and who not only knew the area but lived there herself. We traded emails regularly and described to her what we were looking for. She said she knew of several properties that might work for us and that we should plan a trip down to meet and get to see the area. We agreed and made arrangements to even set down our RV on a corner of her property for the night. The next day she met with us and we talked at length, then she took us around to a couple of parcels she had listed.
One of the problems with the area was that it was very carved up into little 40-acre parcels. Every parcel had an easement around every side and most were separately owned so putting together a larger parcel was difficult. Another concern was that there were really just two types of property, long, skinny (1/8 x 1/2 mile) mountainous parcels which abutted the National Monument, or ¼ x ¼ mile squares, mostly in the valley. The valley properties were generally uninteresting and the mountain properties were half unusable.
On the plus side the mountain and valley views were stunning, there was water at a reasonably accessible level (at least for the valley properties) and there was fast new phone service being put in everywhere with DSL or similar speed connections likely. Grid power was located sporadically throughout the area but possibly available and shopping in Douglas (a major border town with Mexico) an acceptable 45 minutes away.
Another concern was with the proximity to the border there were regular problems with illegal aliens, drug traffickers and the like. A recent flair-up between local ranchers and illegals made national headlines and the Border Patrol was in the process of dramatically increasing their presence in the area.
As for the properties, even with the limitations in types of parcels generally available, there were some larger pieces, often odd-shaped around. Amy show us one 140-acre piece that actually looked pretty interesting. Although a very strange shape, it had a very nice architect-built stone house with a functioning well and generator and a large barn structure. Again the asking price was more than we thought we could work with but more to the point the owner had just died and the son was still in the process of working through probate.
We went home without following up on the property but found ourselves thinking and talking about it quite a bit. We had taken a couple of pictures of it and got to looking at them and now it seemed like it might be worth doing something on. We re-contacted Amy to find out the actual status of the place. After a couple of days she told us she had been in touch with the son who was stationed in Italy. He was definitely interested in selling the property and though probate was slow he and we could construct a purchase if we wanted to. We made another appointment to go down and get into the house.
It was nicer than we had thought and, though much of the land was kind-of scrubby, there were some great and interesting features on the land. We didn’t really like the idea of running a generator all the time and after investigating having grid power run to the property (EXPENSIVE!!) we met with a local man who designed PV solar electric systems and sold the components at 10% above wholesale cost. We got a lot of very good information from him and felt comfortable that we could make the power end of things work for us. We decided to try to structure an offer to buy the property.
One purchase complication for us was that we still had several pieces of property (a small apartment building, a rental house and our own house) to sell before we would have any significant cash we could put toward the property as the bulk of our funds were being used for making a living for us stock trading. To make a long story shorter, we made several attempts over quite a while at creatively structuring a deal with the owners including a very generous lease/purchase agreement but we were not able to come to an agreement in the end.
A bit later in time we scheduled another trip down to have Amy show us a series of 4 contiguous lots located up against the mountains which she had assembled for sale but were forced to cancel the trip. As it turned out, as time went on we became less and less comfortable with some of the border issues in the area. We also came to find out that there were many on-going problems between area landowners and the county revolving around the easements and that there were a growing number of litigations between various neighbors for a multitude of harms, real or imagined. In retrospect I don’t think we would have been as comfortable in that area as we had first thought or hoped.
Please Click here to continue the story with "A Trip to Snowflake"