Rising Circle Ranch sits on 2,600 acres of high desert in New Mexico’s Galisteo Basin, 25 minutes south of Santa Fe. It’s a stretch of land that has drawn people together for well over a thousand years.
People have been part of this landscape almost as long as there have been people here at all. The first inhabitants, Paleo-Indians, passed through as early as 7,500 BCE, hunting and gathering across the Basin. Permanent settlement took hold over the centuries that followed, and by around AD 1300 the Tano people had built multi-story pueblos with hundreds of rooms across the valley, and made this a center of trade, moving turquoise and lead glaze mined in the nearby Cerrillos Hills.
The Basin opens wide in every direction, its grassland and piñon-dotted hills framed by four mountain ranges: the Sangre de Cristos to the northeast, the Sandias to the southwest, and the Ortiz and Jemez beyond. Blue grama and galleta grasses run across the open range, juniper and piñon climb the ridges, and cottonwoods and willows trace the arroyos that cut through the property.
Pronghorn and mule deer move across the land, coyotes call at night, and the Basin sits on a wildlife corridor traveled by bears and mountain lions. The arroyos themselves cut down through rock millions of years old, where a careful eye can still spot fossils.
The Galisteo Basin is recognized as one of the most important archaeological landscapes in the country. The ridgelines of the Basin hold some of the most significant rock art in the Southwest – petroglyphs carved between the 1300s–1600s of star motifs, animals, and shielded figures. Renowned rock-art scholar Polly Schaafsma called this “a magical place bristling with protective powers.” You’ll still find petroglyphs on the ranch’s own ridges today.
The rocks hold an even older story. Around a hundred million years ago, this whole region lay beneath a shallow inland sea. Over millions of years, the rise of the Rocky Mountains and the Sangre de Cristos pushed that water back and lifted the seabed into the high desert you see today – and the arroyos that wind through the ranch still cut down into it. Look closely along their banks and you may find the fossils that the ancient ocean left behind.
The same expansive views that draw guests have drawn filmmakers. Both Johnny Depp’s The Lone Ranger and the acclaimed western series Longmire were shot on the ranch – the land standing in for the mythic American West, because here it’s the real thing.
The Galisteo Basin has drawn people for well over a thousand years, and the way we care for the ranch is meant to keep it that way for the next thousand. Every choice – how the cattle graze, the water is managed, the land is worked – is made with the health of the landscape in mind.
Few places you could gather are actively working to give more to the land than they take. This is one of them.
Photographs only tell part of the story. Walk the land, see the rooms, and feel what more than a thousand years of gathering has left here.