High Coyote Hill is a safe, comfortable, off-grid, permaculture environment for road - dwelling women to share community-building knowledge, or, simply to rest.

After a mainly Bohemian life on and off the road, I reached a middle-aged point of discovery (I’m now 55) that I needed a place to settle and focus my broad work-life experience in one place. With the generous help of family and friends, I bought beautiful acreage in my beloved northern NM, along the Rio Grande.

But what do I, alone, need with so much land?

It’s the way of the world right now that many women of a certain age live in vehicles of one kind or another. With that life comes the need for a safe space to rest, to take cover from a storm, to work on a rig, to make jewelry and art, to eat a warm meal and take a bath with a beautiful view. Maybe even set up for some months in a little adobe casita.

High Coyote Hill is this place …. Part campground, part learning center, part retreat, not to cost more than one has to offer, be it cash, or life experience and hard work to share.

Well-situated between the year-round activities of the Rio Grande Gorge and the Sangre de Christo Mountains, High Coyote Hill is naturally sectioned off for a higher-end, shorter-term campground (glamping), intended to help fund the place of rest envisioned here, as well as my corner, privatized by the hilly landscape.

Though this off-grid experience will be advertised solely to women and will be woman centered, it’s a big place, and men will also be welcome.

A shaded area will be given over to an horno (outdoor oven) for community-building luncheons, with local women who offer indigenous recipes and stories, and I’ll be teaching classes on how to build with the earth -- activities which I’ve successfully brought to life in earlier years. Hopefully, others will want to lend their disparate expertise to the project, so we can all remain vital by continuing to learn and share and do.

Before I can have any of that, I need the water, and the plumbing for the toilets, at least, and places for people to settle safely among the sage.

Though this parcel was deemed unsuitable for farming back in the day, the many arroyos (washes) running down the escarpment I call High Coyote Hill make it perfect for today’s permaculture ideals. As much as possible, we will regreen this land using local foods and trees. It is my intent to later be able to feed people from the gardenHaving said that, I’d like to keep some of the biologically unusual land as it is, to protect parts of it from getting trampled and killed off and then covered with invasive weeds.

It will take many hands and many hours, but it’s an organic project which is already happening, and which fills a need I didn’t see when I started out in my camper 25 years ago. I’m glad to be able to provide.