Ghost Ranch

Location of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico

The Ghost Ranch is a 21,000-acre (85 km²) retreat and education center run by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), located close to the village of Abiquiu in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.

The Ghost Ranch is the subject of many landscapes by the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe, who maintained a summer home there in 1934, then her permanent residence on the property from 1949 until her death. This is where her ashes are scattered.

The last private owner of the Ghost Ranch was Arthur Newton Pack, who donated the ranch to the Presbyterian Church. Arthur Pack was also the publisher of Nature magazine and opened the Ghost Ranch Lodge in Tucson, Arizona and contributed to the creation of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

Sandstone cliffs along the Kitchen Mesa Trail, in Ghost Ranch.

Ghost Ranch includes a famous paleontological site preserving Triassic dinosaurs. Fossil bones were found here as early as 1885. In 1947 the paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert documented the discovery of over a thousand well-preserved fossilized skeletons of a small Triassic dinosaur called Coelophysis in a quarry here. In 2007, fossil remains of Dromomeron romeri, one of the archaic group of animals called "basal dinosauromorphs," were found in the Hayden Quarry. [1]