TOM HARMON/JOURNAL

SUBLIME SETTING: Built in 1912 one mile from the old Santa Fe Trail, the Casa del Gavilan has been converted from a private hacienda to a bed-and-breakfast inn.

Calling on Yesterday
Head North on I-25 for a Trip Back in Time to the Restored Casa del Gavilan

By Tom Harmon
Journal Travel Editor
Does it ever strike you, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, that you are living in wild and beautiful New Mexico but behaving as if you were in Ohio?

If you go The Casa del Gavilan, located on N.M. 21 six miles south of Cimarron, is open year-round. Room rates run from $70 to $100, and include a full breakfast. Telephone 1-800-GAVILAN, or 505-376-2246. Write P.O. Box 518, Cimarron, N.M. 87714.

Do you spend most of your weekends stuck in the city, doing yard work and running errands and hauling the kids to soccer?
Have the mountains become merely a backdrop to your daily life -- something you glance at through the windshield in traffic, but rarely visit anymore?
It might be time to head north.
An amazing thing happens to I-25 as you follow it out of Albuquerque, past Santa Fe and into the mountains.
The eight-lane madhouse that we know as I-25 in Albuquerque gradually becomes a country road, winding through Glorieta Pass along the wagon route of the old Santa Fe Trail.
Just before you cross the Pecos River, you pass the site of Kozlowski's Stage Station. Up ahead are Starvation Peak, Kearny Gap, the Mora River and Wagon Mound.
This is the route you want. For every mile you drive along this route, you seem to go back one year in time.
By the time you turn off I-25 at Springer, the year could be 1940. Twenty-eight miles later, when you leave the blacktop road and clatter across the cattle guard at the Casa del Gavilan bed-and-breakfast inn, it is 1912.
The Casa del Gavilan, or House of the Hawk, is perched in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just south of Cimarron, along the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. It was built in 1912 by Connecticut industrialist J.J. Nairn, who wanted to entertain friends and celebrities in a grand Western style.
One of his guests, Western writer Zane Grey, stayed for weeks -- long enough to write a novel. Grey was clearly impressed with the estate, which provides the setting for the book, "Knights of the Range."
"It was the grandest scene in all New Mexico," he writes on the opening page. "Great timbered escarpments stretching down over the green and gray terraces to the vast rolling plain below, through which the Old Trail followed the shining way of the Cimarron into the purple distance."

A starry night
I was welcomed to the Casa del Gavilan by the smell of piñon smoke and the gleam of the North Star.
It was 8 p.m. I had just made the three-hour drive from Albuquerque, and I was standing at the front door of the inn. The lights were on inside the huge living room. I could see a fire burning brightly, but I didn't open the door.
I needed to stand out in the cold for a minute, in the starlight.
I had forgotten what a starry night looked like. The Little Dipper was as easy to find as the Big Dipper. The Milky Way was eight lanes wide, a celestial I-25.
I stepped inside. Two guests from St. Louis were on the couch, reading a handsome coffee table book on Western bronze sculptor Frederick Remington. On the fireplace mantle above their heads, a replica of Remington's "Wicked Pony" bucked furiously.
On a table in front of the fire, Remington's "Mountain Men" stood guard next to a bottle of red wine and a tray of crackers, cheese and grapes.
The casa, as everyone involved in this old hacienda calls the place, is an unusual venture in historic preservation.
Completely surrounded by the 150,000-acre Philmont Boy Scout Ranch, the casa belongs to 14 men with strong ties to Philmont and scouting. They bought it in 1994, after becoming alarmed when the hacienda and its 225 acres went up for sale for possible commercial development in 1993.
"We didn't want to see it fall into the wrong hands," explained Ned Gold, an Ohio attorney who grew up in Santa Fe and worked on the Philmont staff in the 1950s.
"It was one of those mysterious places," Gold said. "My grandmother told me stories of going up there for dances. It was definitely off-limits to the Scouts at Philmont. It was a private estate."
Gold and Dave Emery, an Ohio photographer who worked at the Scout ranch in the 1970s, set out to find other former Scouts who might be willing to make a joint purchase of the casa. A dozen men and their wives signed on, including Albuquerque attorney Carlos Martinez and his wife, Lupe.
"It had been a bed-and-breakfast under the previous owners," Emery said, and the Scouts decided to continue operating it as an inn.
"We bought it to preserve it," Emery said. "It was such a special place. It needed to be kept up, and shared with others."

Spare no expense
The Casa del Gavilan is a natural inn, since it was designed with entertaining in mind.
J.J. Nairn spared no expense to make his friends comfortable. Each of the main house's four bedrooms has its own bathroom, a rarity at the time.
The high-ceilinged living room is flanked by a library to the north and a dining room to the south. The library, Nairn boasted, contained "one of the finest private collections in the Southwest."
The casa is built around a large central courtyard that was undoubtedly filled with lovely gardens in Nairn's day, but looks a bit neglected today.
It is scheduled for renovation, said Emery, who is the managing member among the owners. "The casa is an old place that needed an awful lot of attention," he said. "We've put in thousands of hours on maintenance."
Innkeeper Helen Hittle showed me around, and then led me across the courtyard to my room in the guest house.
I was sleeping in the Maxwell Room, named for northeastern New Mexico land baron Lucien Maxwell, who controlled 2 million acres in the mid-1800s.
All the bedrooms at the casa are named for historic figures in the region: the Nairn Room, named for our host; the Beaubien Room, named for Lucien Maxwell's bride, Luz Beaubien (she's important: her papa owned the land that Maxwell took over); the Phillips Room, named for Oklahoma oilman and New Mexico rancher Waite Phillips, who donated the Philmont Ranch to the Boy Scouts in the 1940s.
When I crawled under a handmade quilt in the Maxwell Room at 10:30 p.m., there were only two other guests at the casa. When we gathered for breakfast, however, there were nine of us. Late in the night, guests had arrived from Denver, Chicago and Midland, Texas.
In the kitchen, innkeepers Helen and Bob Hittle and housekeeper Isabel Lloyd were busy whipping up a breakfast worth driving all night for: baked pecan french toast with thick-sliced ham, drenched with maple or orange syrup.
Over coffee, we all discussed our plans for the day. The possibilites were numerous: a visit to the Villa Philmonte, Waite Phillips' Mediterranean-style mansion, which is now a museum near the Boy Scout ranch headquarters; the Philmont Museum, which includes an excellent library in memory of artist and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton; the Kit Carson Museum at Rayado, south of the Casa del Gavilan; the St. James Hotel in Cimarron, which played host to most of the outlaws of the Old West, including 26 men who died in the hotel; Cimarron Canyon State Park; trail rides at Bobcat Pass above Red River; and visits to Angel Fire, Capulin Volcano National Monument or the Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge.

Busy day browsing
I spent the day with fellow guests Greg and Muriel Gold, who were married at the casa three years ago.
Our first stop was the St. James, to stare into bedrooms preserved just as they looked when they were used by such legends as Jesse James and Clay Allison. Cimarron is also the home of several art galleries, a museum and a wonderful old hardware store, Burns Hardware.
By the end of the day we had visited the gorgeous rock pallisades of Cimarron Canyon, stopped for ice cream in Eagle Nest, browsed through the Philmont Museum, hiked to a very scary rock tower called Lover's Leap, picnicked in the ponderosa pines and gawked at the buffalo from the road through Philmont.
It was a beautiful day, but we definitely needed some down-time before dinner. The sane approach to a weekend at the casa, Muriel declared, would be to do nothing at all -- except perhaps read a book on the glassed-in porch that runs around two sides of the courtyard.
It never occurred to us that the St. James Hotel, our choice for dinner, would close its elegant dining room at 8 p.m., but it did. That left us with only one option, the Kit Carson Restaurant down the street. It's a locals-and-hunters kind of place, with a big woodstove and a very respectable prime rib.
On Sunday morning, after a delicious green chile and mushroom quiche with bowls of sliced fresh fruit, I flunked Departures 101. I just couldn't leave.
I hiked up to a meadow behind the casa, surprising a couple of mule deer along the way. I drove to Cimarron and back, just to look at Philmont one last time.
I realized that I wanted to take something home with me to keep the weekend alive, but I hadn't bought anything at the museum or picked up anything on my hikes.
I wondered what it would feel like, watching the traffic steadily increasing on I-25 as I drove back to the city. I wasn't ready to trade the Santa Fe Trail for Montgomery Boulevard.
But by the time I reached the Montgomery exit, I knew I was going to be all right. Through the windshield, the Sandias looked entirely different to me. They looked like a place where I'd like to go hiking.