The next week, we had a well drilled. The driller hit water at 405 feet. The well turned out to be a good one, pumping as much as 20 g.p.m. When we arrived the following weekend, the rig was still in place.

We decided to camp for the weekend, pulling up Christy's travel trailer. You can see it in the background here. You can also see that the bugs were still around.

We invited the Stowe's for dinner. Kathleen and Don are the only full-time residents in phase 3. Here's Don, with Gerald.

Joe brought his guitar and entertained us. Here he is with Kathleen Stowe (center) and Christy.

Construction begins

After our builder, Paul Russell, told us he was moving to Missouri at the end of the month, we spent the weekend discussing what to do. We could go back to the Seattle builders, but Gerald was really sold on Paul. He wondered if Paul could get a shell dried in before he left. Paul thought he could. But we would have to work fast. We had the perk test done the following week. Gerald bought the tractor he always wanted. Paul took our rough sketch to his draftsman to create a set of plans. We were back at the land by the following weekend preparing a pad.

Here's what the site looked like when we got there around noon on Saturday.

It was a beautiful May day. Wildflowers were abundant.

So were the bugs. 

Gerald pointed this hat out to me in a hiking store. He laughed when I said I actually wanted to buy it. I was laughing now.

By late afternoon, it looked like were were making a swimming pool. Here's Gerald with Paul. Their heads barely peek over the top of what is to be our garage underneath the house.

Finding a builder

It took us almost as long to find a builder as it did to find the property, maybe longer. Part of the problem was that we didn't know what we wanted to build. We started out with grand ideas, then blanched at the cost and revised our expectations downward.

We stared thinking in terms of the 1,800 square feet minimum that the HOA required and talked to a builder whose published prices seemed reasonable. But by the time we added a walk-out basement and some covered porches, the price skyrocketed. What that builder quoted us for a dried in shell was more than a family member had paid for an entire house, with appliances, before the economy tanked. Now we were in a housing slump and it was going to cost us more for a small, rustic dried in shell than a whole finished house? We couldn't believe it. We kept looking.

Gerald got the idea of building a house that looked like a barn. Oddly enough, I had once had a long-forgotten fantasy about converting an old barn into a house. I also had a fantasy about living off the grid, and we started to think in those terms as well.

Gerald found two barn builders in Seattle who would build a dried-in shell of a barn house for about $20 a square foot, which was much more in line with what we had in mind. That meant that our house plans suddenly got big again, but we had also started to see the potential down the road of making it home full time. And at $20 a square foot, we could do it.

We went to Seattle and saw examples of both builders' work. We also told a new batch of local contractors we had been talking to what they were competing against. One was up to the task. We liked him. He seemed to get what we were after, was fully licensed and thought he could do better on the price. Sold.

Next came the issue of siting the house. For as long as we had owned the land, we had been thinking of one or two sites over looking the meadow. But when we walked the land with our new builder, we surprised ourselves by taking a second look at an area we had ruled out, even though it was a better building site. We wanted our view to face what we have been calling Weaver Peak, our best guess based on the gazetteer. We rejected the spot because it obscured our view of the peak and gave us a lovely view of the mica mine. But moving a little farther west, we found the view quite acceptable.

 

When we staked out the house, it wasn't

perfect. Because we needed to face due south to take advantage of the solar panel, the peak 

would be a nice view from the master suite, not the living room. The east side of the house still had a lovely view of the mica mine. But

 we did face a nice boulder formation we always liked. So were were all set to go. We made an appointment with our builder to meet him at the land on Saturday. 

Saturday arrived. We got up early to make the trip north and there was a message from our builder on Gerald's cellphone. We didn't think it worrisome, as Gerald had left a message the night before that he wanted to push the time back a little. We hadn't heard from him and assumed he was responding. Gerald listen to the message, then said: "Paul's moving to Missouri."

 

Ruger Ranch

The property we bought was part of what used to be the Single-Six Ranch, a 9,000-acre ranch owned by William B. Ruger, Sr. who was a firearms designer and co-founder of firearms company Sturns, Ruger and Co. The Single-Six was the single action revolver Ruger introduced in 1953.

Sturns, Ruger bought the ranch in 1986. It was used a private retreat. Ruger's son, William B. Ruger, Jr. sold the ranch in 2003 for $5.9 million a little more than a year after his father's death. The money was used to expand production capacity for the company's Newport, N.H., manufacturing facility. It also allowed the company to show a profit in an otherwise flat year.

Arizona Land and Ranches bought the property and subdivided it into 36-acre ranchettes. The ranch headquarters were located on the part of the property that is now known as Ruger Meadows. Our property is located in phase 3, about four miles north of Peeple's Valley, half-way between Wickenburg and Prescott. It's exactly two hours from our Mesa home.

To get there, you must pass through Wickenburg and head up 89 through Congress, over a cut into Yarnell (home of the legendary Cornerstone Bakery), and past a number of ranches owned by a rancher named Rex Maughn. Maughn owns South Fork in Dallas, as well as 28 Arizona ranches. Some of the ranches in the vicinity of Ruger Ranch include East Fork,  West Fork and North Fork.

Maughn made  his fortune in aloe vera. He started as a direct marketer, then got into growing and distribution. He currently owns the largest aloe vera plantation in the world, located in the Dominican Republic. The benefit to us is that he's got more money than he can spend, so his ranches are beautiful, with fat Angus cattle and sprinklered fields. They make for a lovely drive. So does a thoroughbred farm, with green pastures, acres of white fences and tall cottonwood trees that turn golden in the fall.

Phase 3 of Ruger Ranch is accessed by a dirt road surrounded by high-desert landscape. At first, it's flat and open, but then begins to climb into the Weaver Mountains. By the time you get to our parcel, the land is full of granite boulders as big as luxury cars. The ground is thick with pinyon pine, manzanilla and scrub oak. A lone alligator juniper stands in the center of a meadow at the edge of our property.

There is a ruined tin barn that has been preserved as a "ranch relic," and across the road is a windmill and a stock pond. Also across the road, the remains of an old mica mine scar the hillside. These have all become landmarks we give to various contractors. Arizona Land and Ranches tells us our property used to be referred to as the Scott place, and that's all the direction we have to give to some of the longtime locals. An excavator we talked to told us he had camped in our meadow with the mountain lion posse. He said he thought it was the prettiest spot on the whole ranch.

The ranch is still grazed. We signed a grazing lease with the rancher, Steve Hampton, which allowed us to get an agricultural exemption from the county tax assessor's office. It's not uncommon to find cows resting in the shade of our juniper or clustered near the windmill.

The land of opportunity

It all started innocently enough. We had some money from an unusually good tax return. The stock market and interest rates were both falling, making our usual investment options seem less desirable. The price of land and housing was also falling, but that felt more like an opportunity. We could buy a little piece of land and maybe put a second home on it. Construction had nearly ground to a halt in metro Phoenix, where we live. So our plan seemed doable.

We looked for a long time. Prices were still a lot higher than we had hoped. Plus, we had a few criteria. The land had to be within two hours from home (or we'd never go there), it should be a higher elevation (so we could escape the blistering heat of the desert in summer) and it had to be off the major highways (or we'd have to fight the traffic created by people escaping the heat along with us).

Finally, we thought we found the perfect place. It was on the outskirts of a little mining community an hour and a half away. It was only 10 degrees or so cooler than Phoenix, but it had a newly remodeled farm house, a barn that would make a cool renovation project and was surrounded by National Forest land. We were so sold on this place, we almost didn't drive to Peeple's Valley, halfway between Wickenburg and Prescott, to check out a piece of land Gerald had seen advertised on the Internet. We went just to make sure we weren't missing something really great.

The advertised land was a nice piece of property, with pinyon pines in a lovely valley. Unfortunately, it also overlooked a cluster of unattractive mobile homes. The seller introduced us to his Realtor, Dorman Olsen, at Hilltop Realty in nearby Yarnell. We looked all over Peeple's Valley that morning. Had lunch, then Dorman took us to phase 3 of what used to be Ruger Ranch, a development of 36-acre parcels.

That's when we fell in love. Dorman drove us all over the land, mostly to lots on the tops of ridge lines. They were beautiful. But after climbing up a hill so steep that Dorman feared his car wouldn't make it, I wondered what we would do up there. True, we could see for 360 degrees. But then what? The peak was so steep, we couldn't even walk around. I'm all for hiking, but I wanted it to be a choice. 

On the way, Dorman had pointed to some preserved ranch relics, a windmill and a barn in a little meadow. I thought it was lovely. "What about that land?" I asked. "Is that for sale, too?" 

He said it was, though he had no information about it. We drove back down and stood on the edge of the meadow that overlooked a ruined tin barn. It was early fall and the meadow still had that thick green look of late summer. The afternoon sun tinted everything with a golden hue. I fell in love.

We asked Dorman to find out the price, and he called Gerald on Monday. Gerald called me. "How much do you think it's listed for?" he asked. I guessed the top of the range of the other parcels we had been looking it. Then he told me it was listed for less money than any other parcel for sale in phase 3. What's more, the owner was a California investor who was desperate to get out from under it. We couldn't believe it.

We brought up our neighbors the next weekend to see if they would be interested in splitting the lot with us. They were. At the end of the negotiations, we bought the land for exactly what the owner had paid for it three years earlier, in 2004. We were feeling pretty smart.