Rancho Concepcion

Hi all,

I just wanted to share the news that my Wife and I are now the very proud owners of a magnificent 1200 acre property on the way up to San Pedro Martir park. Its actually marked on the Baja almanac, but probably the only people that have seen it are racers participating in the Baja 500 or 1000 as it passes right past the ranch!
I'll back up a bit, we 1st learned about it when we stayed at Meling ranch a couple years ago, Andrea told us that her Sister Sandra and her husband David Lang had another ranch further up the road that might be for sale. This was exciting news to us as we had been horse farming for 15 years and had been considering selling our farm and trying out a new adventure! My Wife wanted a small bit of land suitable for a couple of her horses and I wanted a dark sky free of light pollution (thats most of Baja BTW!) at a reasonable elevation. When David took us to see the property the following fall we did'nt expect to find the "perfect" place, after all this was only the first property that we were visiting. After winding our way up the 6 km dirt road we rounded the last corner through a wonderful live oak forest and came into a spectacular clearing perfect for a small paddock and house. But the view of the edge of SPM park loomed in a gorgeous panoply to the east!! WOW this was more than perfect! The thing that struck us was the immense stillness of the place, not a sound of so-called civilised world to be heard! Only sounds of birds and the breeze blowing through the oaks! For those of you who have been to Meling and know a bit about its history, rancho Concepcion was where Aida Meling was wanting to retire to and there are still the remains of the falling down building which was to be her home. Sadly she passed away before she could move there permanently.
There is a small apple orchard there with delicious apples, if you ever tasted the apple pie at meling you would have had those same apples!
If we are able to sell our horse business here in Canada then we plan on starting the building of our new home in Baja this fall. We have an architect from the San Felipe area that specializes in adobe (compressed earth brick to be exact) off-grid homes, if we can find a nearby source of clay soil then we can make all of the bricks at the site from the soils found there! A stream that runs year round will supply us with power via a small hydro turbine, the rest of the power will come from PV cells.
Eventually after we get up and running with the house we would like to do an astronomy B&B with small cottages for people to stay in, but I imagine we will get people that are also interested in birding and nature in general. The steep cliffs to the east are home to the condors, Duane Meling told us that they can be seen on occasion. I included a couple pics of our spot, hopefully some of you will come to visit us in the future! Oh yes Google earth got updated about a week ago with new high res data the whole area west of SPM is now high res, including concepcion!

and heres the "road" leading towards Mikes Sky ranch, David Lang told us its VERY rough

I know some of you have tried the shortcut before Meling that takes you to MSR but apparently this one is even rougher!!

heres the small apple orchard right before harvest time!

Congratulations and good luck with your adventure. Thanks for the pictures.

thanks bruce...now i have to buy a bunch of horses

Thanks for the best wishes everyone! I just wish our farm would hurry up and sell so we can start our adventure!

Bruce--I agree the ranch folk (I think its true the world over) are especially warm people.

Jorgie-- I honestly don't know about leasing land, we bought concepcion through the forming of our own Mexican corporation. The property is just inside the restricted zone by a few km!

Rob, thats very interesting that you almost took the step of buying Meling. Love to see your pics of concepcion sometime!
Most of concepcion lies at around 4800' so it will dip just below freezing at night during the winter, hell thats balmy though compared to Ontario winters with weeks on end with -20 C!
The road to the observatorio will be totally paved by end of the summer, there is talk of bringing power lines up the mountain to the observatory. There are some VERY big scopes going to be built there in the years to come, like 8 meter class instruments, and they will need much more power than what their current generator capacity can supply!
Modern scopes are sadly never looked through, they have instrument packages with CCD cameras and spectrographs.
SPM has some of the best astronomical conditions in the northern hemisphere! So my "little" scopes should find a happy home there!

cheers

Astro

Congratulations Astrobaja!!

I have enjoyed your contributions here in the past and look forward to seeing more, now that you will be growing roots in Baja soil.... How fortunate!

The bed & breakfast or perhaps a camping area too is a wonderful idea, and like with Shari's Bahia Asuncion B&B, I am happy to help get the word out!

You have a big 'back yard'!: