Follow in the footsteps of dinosaurs, Ancestral Pueblo creators, and Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch.
By Katy Kelleher /
photos by Gabriella Marks
Visitors traverse terrain Georgia O’Keeffe helped to make famous.
“THERE, SEE THOSE FLOWERS,” calls Susan Cross from the front of the small bus. “Those are mariposa lilies. This is a special sight; they don’t bloom every year.”
Cross, our guide on the Ghost Ranch Georgia O’Keeffe Landscape Tour, speaks loudly to make her voice heard over the washboard rhythm of tires on a pitted road. I press my nose to the window like a child, spotting the white fragile flowers nodding in the breeze. Although we’ve come for a greater understanding of the modernist painter, we’re also learning about rare desert lilies—a flower that O’Keeffe, despite her reputation for painting larger-than-life blooms, rarely turned her brush toward.
It wasn’t that O’Keeffe didn’t care for New Mexico’s flowers. She cared a great deal about the flora, fauna, history, and culture of her adopted home state. But as Cross explains, the artist arrived in the arid steppe during a particularly dry year in the 1930s. “There weren’t any flowers for her to paint,” Cross tells us later, “but she found many bones.”
A guide shows off an O'Keeffe painting versus the reality she used as inspiration.
These animal remains would become another of O’Keeffe’s hallmarks, as distinctive as her triangular abstractions of red mountains and her swirling white datura blossoms. Cross chuckles as she explains how much O’Keeffe’s gallerist, photographer, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz, disliked her stark white images of cattle bones. “She kept sending him crates of bones she found out here anyway.” The women in our small group on the two-hour tour chuckle in unison; we know what it’s like to embrace one’s unladylike side.
Together, we photograph the large, gnarled, long-dead juniper that the painter would call Gerald’s Tree for its resemblance to her friend Irish author Gerald Heard.
We listen as Cross gestures to the hills beyond the forked ruins of the tree. “She often chose the more modest landforms rather than the very dramatic ones,” Cross says, pointing below the majestic ridges toward the geometric marvels of color and shade known by geologists as “chimney formations.”
The Ghost Ranch Georgia O'Keeffe Landscape Tour provides an immersive exploration of the landscapes that inspired O'Keeffe.
She shuffles through her laminated papers and holds a pair of images above her head for our consideration. We examine the paintings, part of O’Keeffe’s series of abstracted landscapes based on rock formations on her Abiquiú ranch. We see the soft, moody tones of the rocks in Purple Hills No II, the graceful saddle shape of the mountains and sky in Red Hills and Sky, and the twisted lines of timber in Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills. The reproductions provide a better understanding of O’Keeffe’s inspiration, as well as the features of Ghost Ranch she chose not to paint.
To lay the initial groundwork for our tour—which took us to many of the places where O’Keeffe liked to paint and sketch—we spent an hour inside Ghost Ranch’s two museums: the Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology and the Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology. It was a pleasant surprise to realize that both had been named for pioneering women in their fields, a fact that O’Keeffe would have no doubt appreciated.
Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico journey was marked by her deep appreciation for the region's flora, fauna, and landscapes, which she captured in her paintings despite the initial lack of flowers due to a dry year.
Our guides—science educator Graham Burke and assistant collections manager Kathryn Ritter—compress hundreds of millions of years of history into an hourlong sprint through time. This region of New Mexico, we learn from Burke, was once a swampy floodplain overrun with large insects, small dinosaurs, seed ferns, and club mosses.
Some 200 million years ago, during the Triassic period, six-foot-long carnivorous bipedal Coelophysis roamed the region. Paleontologists believe it was a flood that killed the hundreds of creatures found in the famous Ghost Ranch “graveyard,” a pit of fossilized bones discovered in 1947. In the middle of the Museum of Paleontology sits a large piece of this site—bones and all. “They built the museum around these rocks,” Burke adds as he stands over the pale taupe boulder with its embedded fossils.
In the anthropology museum, Ritter leads us around cases of pottery shards, arrowheads, and stone bowls, artifacts from the Ancestral Pueblo people who once settled in these purple hills and green valleys. She displays her dry sense of humor while showing off a set of imitation shell beads from AD 1150. “I think of them as knockoff Fendi bags,” she says. “Shells were status items, and since we’re far from the ocean, the people who lived here made their own out of clay.”
DID YOU KNOW?
Georgia O’Keeffe casually studied both anthropology and paleontology. Her interest in the dinosaurs that lived in this region, as well as her support for the bone diggers at Ghost Ranch, landed the painter a unique tribute: In 2006, a prehistoric reptile of the Late Triassic of New Mexico was given the official name Effigia okeeffeae.
We also examine pottery fragments from the 16th century and a stunning series of landscape photographs by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero. Although somewhat eclectic, the collection lends context to the story of Ghost Ranch as a place continually inhabited and beloved.
I leave with a renewed appreciation for northern New Mexico and its colorful dirt, surprising blooms, and huge blue skies. I also depart feeling closer to the people of the past, including O’Keeffe and the innumerable creators who have trod this ground since.
Read more:Find art in all its forms during these experiences.
In addition to the Georgia O’Keeffe Landscape Tour, Ghost Ranch offers paleontology, landscape, and horseback excursions. $25–$130.
