With 30,000 unspoiled and protected acres of wilderness as your week-long personal playground, backcountry horseback riding at northeast Sonora's Rancho Los Baños offers almost unlimited hours of thrilling, challenging, yet fun-filled adventure riding in remote, rugged and secluded isolation, surrounded by sierras, hills, canyons and unsurpassed, unspoiled nature. Indeed, the sheer vastness of the ranch will inspire you, while the landscapes and scenery that makes us unique will thrill you.
Discover a world-class riding ranch, quickly gaining worldwide recognition for our outstanding riding trails, our scenery, our back country and adventures. To ride at the ranch is to ride at one of the best riding ranches anywhere in the world. Indeed, those who know riding, and have been to the ranch, continue to return, year after year, having fallen in love with riding at the ranch. It is safe to say that no other ranch in Arizona, Mexico or the Southwest offers the scenery, pristineness, vastness, landscapes and freedom experienced at our ranch.
At the ranch, besides our many scenic nature trails, you can also ride to numerous historical attractions. Our guests visit a 17th century abandoned Jesuit gold mine [at 6,000 feet of elevation with views that go for miles], by the name of San Jose, where many Native American slaves perished. Deep inside a scrub oak, canopy-filled canyon at the foot of 7,500 ft El Pinito Mountain, guests also visit the remains of a 19th century bandit hiding camp where both American and Mexican outlaws went to lay low. After all, the Wild West did not end at the border.
You can also ride to 2,000 year old pre-Colombian dwellings full of pictographs, deep inside El Cajon Canyon, or visit a 20 mile long lake, and its dam, built during the Great Depression by the architects and engineers that also built Hoover Dam [the dam is a smaller replica of Hoover]. Guests also visit the ruins of an early 20th century homestead, with a genuine Model T Ford skeleton gathering rust.
At Cat Claw Cliffs, you will ride up to the top, with spectacular 360 degree views. These cliffs and its canyons, the story goes, hold the lost gold of an outlaw on the run, stashing his treasure after robbing a stagecoach. If that is not enough, you can ride to magnificent views of famous El Tigre, a nearby Sierra Madre mountain that acted as Geronimo's [famous Apache chief] Last Stronghold. Indeed, to ride at the ranch is to ride in what was once prime Apache country, where the fierce warriors once rode, camped and lived. At the ranch, after all, you are riding, breathing and living through history.
Besides riding through history, you will also ride through a diversity seldom seen at a guest ranch. You will explore pristine wilderness and diverse habitats and have chance encounters with our wildlife, including mountain lion. Guests ride to our high country, passing through vertical sierras, to locations such as Los Toros, 'The Bulls,' a mountainous region so remote and secluded few humans have ever seen. Indeed, so remote is this region, that ferrel cattle roam its mountains, seldom, if ever, having seen a single human being.
You will also ride to 'El Sordo,' 'The Deaf Man,' high country so named for the incredible, omnipresent silence and quietness one encounters when there. Down in our Canyonlands, you will ride through stunning, wet, box canyons full of life, with cliff walls hundreds of feet high. You will ride through rock formations, formed over eons, that are beautiful manifestations of nature as it artistically carves its way through time.
Throughout the ranch, you will explore habitats that are varied, diverse and exotic. You will see regions full of desert palm trees, organ pipe cacti, ocotillo forests, sycamore canopies and much more. You will ride through hills covered in knee-high, golden-colored grass, and see a vast collection of high country vegetation. With a riding elevation between 3,200 to 6,000 feet, your entire conception of what a desert is will be radically altered.
With no signs of civilization, you will immerse yourself in our high desert environments, whether riding inside box canyons, river beds, vertical and rocky sierras, high elevation terrains, ravines, cliffs, mesas and/or rolling foothills dressed in golden grass. With elevation range between 3,200 and 6,000 feet above sea level, you can select our high country or canyonlands riding trails. With our old and new school genuine Mexican cowboys as your guides, along with our European cowgirls, riding at Rancho Los Baños will become an unforgettable experience, whether you are an experienced rider or an eager beginner.