The Ranch – Cueva Larga

A fantastic little hike at the Ranch is to hit one of the documented prehistoric sites in the Ranch, Cueva Larga – the Big Cave.

You can leave straight out of your base camp at Papalotito Colorado and head just about due north on an old jeep trail that is frankly, pretty rough – I don’t know that I’d want to drive my own truck down it!  The entire hike is dominated to the north and west by a peak that I started calling the sombrero, for obvious reasons!

The Sombrero

After a couple of miles or so you can’t help but notice a nice string of cottonwoods – and in the desert, cottonwoods equal water.

Water

You’ll more or less turn right at the cottonwoods and follow the creek along until you notice Cueva Larga in the canyon wall to the north.

After a short, steep, gravel filled climb, you arrive in the cave and are greeted with a fantastic wall filled with a wide variety of pictographs – as well as a great deal of fern growing out of the wall.

Red Paint

It’s instantly apparent why someone would want to hang out here.  Close access to a water supply, shelter from the elements and tucked up high in the canyon wall it’s a good defensive position from anyone wishing you harm.

After a brief stint in the cave, we headed back down to the creek and sat down to enjoy lunch – and could not have asked for a more scenic location.  Between the sound of the wind blowing down in the canyon and the water trickling along in the creek – it’s as peaceful and quiet a location as you could find anywhere.

Lunchtime

Instead of hiking back the way we came, our party continued to head down into the canyon, exploring as we went along.  Among the group we had 4 GPS units, plenty of water and food,  emergency tarps, blankets, and ways to make fire if we had to.  I can’t stress enough to you – if you’re not prepared to spend the night, don’t bother doing what we did.  Getting lost at the Ranch could very well turn bad – very quickly.  So be prepared.

We meandered down the canyon for a bit, and then climbed up and out of the canyon and back to the original trail and then back into camp.  All in all it was a full day’s hike and we got to see some fantastic scenery.  As dinner was cooking, I snuck off to shoot some more pictures of the sun setting over the nearby water tank  and was rewarded on one side with the full moon rising

Moonrise over the desert

and the other with a great panoply of stars chasing the sun down.

The heavens

And as usual, our neighbors for the week provided all the musical entertainment one could wish for with a series of cries, howls and barks as the moon rose.  My walk back to camp was wonderful with the conflicting scents of dinner in the dutch oven, smoke from the fire and the nearly always present creosote smell of the desert mixing in the air.

~ by Derrick Birdsall on March 25, 2010.