Raymond Barnett

After following the Chama River several miles, Al and I turned the rental car off Hwy 84 northwest of Santa Fe at dusk and drove into the canyon where Ghost Ranch is located. The ranch is now a 21,000-acre workshop center. Though not enrolled in a class, we had obtained lodging there, and were directed to one of a cluster of rooms not 50 yards from the “Georgia O’Keeffe cottage,” the principal bungalow where the artist spent the last 50 summers of her life. Some ten miles to the south the distinctive flat-topped mesa Cerro Pedernal loomed in the dying light, immortalized in so many of O’Keeffe’s paintings, as was the Chama River also.

The evening was cold, so we stumbled into the dining room across the dirt road and pirated cups of cocoa. It had been a long day, Read More 

The Southwest was the theme of my recent February trip with Al, and it featured large doses of train travel, a passion for my friend ever since his frequent boyhood jaunts to the nearby San Jose train yard with his dad. We boarded the connecting bus in Chico just before 8 in the morning and after a relaxing train ride through the length of California’s San Joaquin Valley arrived in Los Angles by another connecting bus shortly after 7 that evening, sauntering out of the venerable (and newly polished) 1939 Union Station past Olvera Street a block to our hotel.

Turn-of-the-century Los Angeleno Charles Lummis claimed to have christened the New Mexico-Arizona-southern California area as “the Southwest,” so we visited his home, El Alisal, after huevos rancheros in Olvera Street the next morning.  Read More