The Ranch · Eight Chambers
The Caves
Eight rooms cut by hand into the Navajo sandstone, a hundred feet above a bend in the Colorado. The rock holds its own temperature. You will notice it the moment you step inside.
Stay · The Ranch · The Caves
The Ranch · Eight Chambers
Eight rooms cut by hand into the Navajo sandstone, a hundred feet above a bend in the Colorado. The rock holds its own temperature. You will notice it the moment you step inside.
What there is
There will never be a ninth. The cliff decided that in the 1970s, and nothing since has argued with it.
Why they exist
More than fifty years ago, Bud Tangren began carving into the sandstone above the Colorado River.
The ranch was called Tangri-La. A small airstrip ran below the cliffs, and pilots would land there to see what Bud was making.
Using a compressor and an extraordinary amount of patience, Bud worked his way into the sandstone, shaping chambers from the rock itself. Each one followed the contours of the cliff. Each one carried the character of the place into its walls.
Some places are built on the landscape. This one was built from it.
Inside
A private entrance and a single room. Sandstone takes a season to change temperature, so it doesn't — the cave sits near sixty degrees while the canyon outside does whatever it likes. Room-darkening curtains at the mouth, for anyone who intends to sleep past the sun.
The bathhouse
The chambers have no plumbing. Cutting a bathroom into solid sandstone was beyond what Bud could do with a compressor, and it is beyond what we would do to the cliff now.
So there is a bathhouse, a short walk from the mouths: hot showers, proper basins, kept to the standard of the rooms rather than the standard of a campground. We would rather tell you this on the way in than have you find it on the way to bed.
Getting here
The ranch sits on 130 acres at the end of a dirt road, surrounded on every side by public land. It is remote by design. After dark, the sky opens up, the canyon goes quiet, and there is little to hear beyond the river and the landscape around you.
Come with what you need for the night. Town is there in the morning if you want it.
After dark
There is a particular thing that happens here, and every guest reports it the same way. You spend the day inside stone. Then you step out at nine at night and the Milky Way is doing something you had forgotten it could do — because the nearest streetlight is forty-five minutes away and the cliff behind you blocks even that.
Chairs sit outside each mouth for exactly this. No one has ever used them in daylight.
Reserve
They book earliest in spring and latest in the heat. If your dates are firm, tell us and we will hold what we can.