Sandstone Ranch is a working family ranch in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. We are a mile beyond the end of a road to nowhere, at about 7000 ft elevation, which we usually love. The mile of private road/driveway is really great except in snow or mud season, when we would be completely stranded except for our fleet of trusty Suzuki King Quads; the snow we can plow with the tractors or Bobcat, but the mud is like a coating of grease on ice!

So far the ranch is non-profit - not by intention, of course. We have 130 acres of dryland alfalfa hay, and in order to harvest our hay last summer, we had to have a swather/windrower (1970's Hesston 520 - to cut, condition, and windrow the hay), a hay baler (3 now, actually - 1970's vintage Case 200, a 60's International 47T, and a 60's International 46T), and a tractor to run it all (1989 Zetor 5211). Our first baler, the Case, suffered a fatal disaster three-quarters of the way through the hay and had to be quickly replaced. In addition to all that equipment, after moving a few loads of hay out of the field by hand, we decided that we needed a auto-stacking bale wagon to deal with the 5200 bales of hay we got! We purchased a 60's vintage New Holland 1032 bale wagon, but then discovered that our Zetor tractor wasn't big enough to run it safely, so we had to purchase a bigger tractor to run it. We found a 1970's Case/David Brown 870 tractor, weighing in at something near 12,000 pounds, and now we have it here at the Ranch as well. In addition to all of the hay equipment, there was lots of other essential equipment that had to be bought, borrowed, begged, or any other way we could think of - we had to get a "brush-hog" mower to chop the chamisa and sage brush out of the edges of the hayfield, a disc harrow to chop the weedier places in the field for re-planting, a drag (or pasture) harrow to remove the dead weeds and old alfalfa stems from the fields before the new crop comes up in the spring, and on and on...

We have a flock of sheep that would love to graze the weeds (and alfalfa), but the fences aren't finished yet; a few charming (not...) llamas (who we thought would guard the sheep from predators, but one of them turned out to hate sheep, and spits on them instead...); a few fiber goats, who travel across their world by jumping from the back of one sheep to another; an ancient Arabian horse and his equally ancient donkey friend to add amusement; a dozen or so satin angora rabbits contributing their wonderfully soft wool in many colors; a pair of Anatolian shepherd guard dogs to keep the wild beasties in their places (somewhere else, preferably). So far the dogs have kept the deer and elk out of the haystacks and the coyotes, bear, bobcats and mountain lions from dining on the livestock.

Being a mile and a half from road maintenance, power, phone lines, and water has it good and bad points. We have solar and wind power (and a diesel generator for the times when the sun doesn't shine enough...), but our phone and internet were first installed last winter - we had almost 2 miles of military field (phone) wire laid out in the snow, mud, and sagebrush. It worked!! We even got DSL internet service (not as reliable or fast as it could have been, but still usable) until the local elk herd waltzed through the wire a few times, followed by the snowmobiles. After that, the local pocket gopher population discovered that the insulation on the phone wire made a tasty snack. Needless to say, we spent a large amount of time fixing the phone line throughout the winter. We got very good at finding and splicing out problems in the phone wire, but after adding so many splices, the DSL didn't want to work anymore, so we had to replace it section by section throughout the winter and spring. We were most relieved when the phone company arrived with their trencher to put in a REAL cable - but their trencher was no match for our hard clay and sandstone, so a Cat D8K with a 5 ft shank ripper tooth had to be called in...

So far we have only one really permanent building completed - the power shed for our batteries and inverter system giving us our wonderful electricity. We have a "portable" 10 x 20 foot kitchen/dining hall, a 38 x 48 foot barn ("Clear-Span" metal frame "super moo-tel") for the animals and some hay, 2 metal storage containers (rodent, water, and dust-proof), and 3 RV's that we live in...

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