This weekend, we took an excursion south of Animas to an old (ghost?) town called Cloverdale. (Spoiler: There isn’t much town left.)

It was a beautiful drive with amazing landscapes. Most of the land down there was bought up some time back by the Diamond A Ranch, which is 321,000 acres and is connected with the Nature Conservancy. Despite that, there were “no trespassing” signs posted everywhere.

On the whole drive, we only saw two other vehicles, one Border Patrol and one rancher, both pretty close to Animas. We did see several pronghorn as well.

In the southern part of this land, we found an old abandoned homestead house. We also had directions to the old Cloverdale cemetery. It turned out that there wasn’t a road to it any more, but we walked a mile or so and found it.

Near there, the ranch is bordered by large amounts of national forest and BLM land which you can access by road. We are definitely going to return and do some camping down there.

Being there felt like being in a place no one else had been in a very long time.