What We Found on the Land

When we first walked the property, we knew very little about what we had found.

Near the front of the land stood a badly deteriorating stone and timber building. The walls appeared to have been built with stone pulled directly from the property. Heavy timbers were stacked almost like Lincoln Logs. The boards were rough hewn. The front stone wall had almost completely collapsed.

Then we looked up.

Poles supporting the old hay loft were actual tree trunks, stripped of their branches and put to work. There was nothing decorative about the building. Whoever built it used what was available and built something that had managed to remain standing for a very long time.

But what was it?

A barn seemed likely, especially with the hay loft and an earthy animal smell. But had someone lived here too? How old was it? Who built it?

We didn’t know. We weren’t even sure how safe it was to go inside.

It was beautiful and a mystery. We immediately started wondering whether it could be saved and, if it could, how much work that would take.

The mysteries kept coming

A meadow near the front of the property had an old horse shelter. Nearby was what looked like a wishing well that appeared to have functioned as an actual well at some point. At least that’s what it looked like. We didn’t know.

North of the barn, we found a cleared building site where a home had obviously once stood. There was no house now and we had no idea what had happened to it. But the site was flat, open and already had the feel of a place where a home belonged.

We could picture our little cabin there almost immediately.

Then there were the 10 acres themselves.

The property is roughly 2 acres wide and 5 acres deep, stretching west from the road until the back boundary meets the national forest. A rough road runs up the south side from the old barn toward the far corner of the property.

At the forest boundary, we found an old barbed-wire fence and a cowboy gate. Some of the rusted barbed-wire was still standing. Some was down. The gate was still tight spanning between fence posts and held firm with wire loops. However the fence next to it was down. Not real effective.

Another narrow path wound along the north side of the property. We weren’t sure whether people had made it or whether we were following a game trail.

We kept walking.

There were more meadows and small clearings, thick stands of ponderosa pine, groves of Gamble oak and scattered one-seed juniper. We found wildflowers, prickly pear cactus and yucca. We startled deer and squirrels and spotted woodpeckers, bluebirds and hummingbirds.

And then we discovered that the trails behind the property connected with trails and forest roads in the national forest.

We had 10 acres to explore, followed by thousands more acres of public land just beyond an old wire gate.

Where exactly are we?

There was one problem with all this wandering. We weren’t always sure when we were still on our own property.

The north and south fence lines didn’t extend the full length of the parcel, and there were few obvious markers once we got into the trees. We started using our onX Hunt maps as we walked so we could see the property boundaries and figure out where our land ended.

It became part hike, part scavenger hunt. Every trip seemed to produce something we hadn’t noticed before. A clearing, a path, another stand of trees. Some remnant that made us wonder who had been here before us and what the property had once looked like.

The questions were piling up.

Less than an hour away

For all the things we didn’t know about the property, there was one thing we figured out very quickly.

It was close.

From our home, we could be in the mountains in less than an hour. We could come up for an afternoon and still be home for dinner. We could spend the night and get back to work in about the same amount of time as a normal commute.

That changed the way we thought about the property.

This could be a place we actually used. A lot.

And sitting near the front of those 10 acres was the cleared site where another home had once stood. It was almost exactly where we would have chosen to put the small mountain retreat we’d been imagining.

The land had the forest. It had trails. It had wildlife. It had room to wander and places that made us want to stop and stay awhile.

It also had a story we knew almost nothing about.

Who built the old stone and timber building? How long had it been there? Who lived on this land? What happened to the house that once occupied the old building site?

We decided to find out.