credits - Anthony Falbo - Falboarts.com
The plateau at first glance seems to be entirely free of wildlife. There are miles of nothing but sagebrush and native grasses no taller than your waist. You can scan from horizon to horizon and see little but a few hawks, crows and mountain bluebirds that thrive in the New Mexican desert. But the birds presence tells the true story. Where there are crows, and especially hawks, you know that wildlife thrives below.
Up until this point we’ve been using an old bladed driveway that the previous owner cut to his building site. Since the little road led us directly to the shed, we kept on using it as a starting point for all of our activities. Now that our focus has shifted to the new house site we came to the point where we needed to put in a real driveway.
The plateau has a remarkably diverse set of landscapes from the heavily forested ridge-lines to quasi-desert mesa. The mesa is considered desert by some because of its lack of vegetation (read trees)but its anything but deserted. The land holds many types of shrubs and grasses, and even in this fairly dry place (less than 15″ rain per year) there are still the occasional oak and pine trees in low lying areas.
One of the things we noticed as we were digging in the soil was the quantity of heavy, black, pock-marked stones in each shovel full. They range in size from peas to boulders, some of them well over 50 kilograms. We began collecting them for later use and stacked them in several piles around the building site. The small to medium stones will make excellent filler for a rubble trench.
With the boundaries of our house and garden set, we commenced with the task of clearing the cordoned area of it’s sage brush and grasses. Traditional house-building would say that this is the point where we hire a bulldozer or grader to come in and prepare the site. In fact, one of our neighbors strongly suggested that we hire someone with a tractor to come in and clear the entire 20 acres.
Once the location for the house became clear to us we set about measuring a rough area that would include the “fenced in” area encompassing the house, outdoor spaces and gardens. With some gardening stakes in hand we marked off the rough plan for the house(s) and garden.
After the warranty deed was recorded we made a few trips out to the land just to walk around and get a feel for the space. The first trip, of course, involved a bit of champagne and was far less productive than otherwise might have been. Still, we wanted to spend some time scouting the possible locations for the house. On the next trip, slightly more serious-minded, we found the perfect place to put the house.
Looking for land in the Taos area turned out to be more of a challenge than we’d counted on. Our plan was to complete the purchase by the end of January, but by the beginning of February and a couple of failed deals later, we were still without land. We realized that in order to find acreage in our price range we were going to have be pretty far from town. As I said in the previous post, we were looking for 5 to 10 acres and in the Taos area that will run you from $75,000 to well over $200,000.
If you read our previous post about the Search for Land you know that we spent some time creating a list of requirements for our new homestead. With those criteria, and guided by the desire to be in a place we both love and where we could become more or less self-sufficient, we began our land search.
Once you commit yourself to an idea, it seems to create it’s own momentum. We had barely finished the thought of starting something new when we were already scanning the maps for a suitable place. Having spent most of my adult life travelling around the United States I was already pretty sure of where I didn’t want to live. That narrowed things down by about seventy-five percent. After taking an hour or so to contemplate the pluses and minuses of each region we decided it would probably be better to make a list of the things we wanted, so we could evaluate a place based on our wants and needs, rather than some perception of perfection.