July 21, 2022
Volume 52 - No. 28
By Jim Winnerman
The unique experience awaiting guests at Rancho de la Osa begins 50 miles before they arrive at the isolated 600-acre location far into the Sonoran Desert, just over an hour south of Tucson, Arizona. The first hint visitors see are yellow caution signs warning freerange cattle may be on the highway. More signs alert motorists to be on the lookout for wild burros (yes, wild burros) and deer. Every
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few miles the road suddenly dips, and signs warn against driving into standing water when the unexpected rain gushes out from desert ravines, and swiftly washes over the narrow two-lane road.
Visitors run out of American highway just as the 30-foot-high border wall comes into view, looming in the distance as if it was an art installation by the late artist Christo. There the pavement ends in the almost abandoned and tiny border town of Sasabe, where a two-mile
dirt road wanders off to the ranch. After the ranch had been closed for a few years, Russell True and his partners purchased it in 2015. “The ranch well might be home to more Arizona history than anywhere else,” True has said. “We bought it to save it.” The history he refers to possibly begins as long ago as the year 300 AD when the ranch site was a village for Tohocom O’Odham Indians, who viewed the nearby 7730-foot Baboquivari Mountains
Rancho de la Osa Continued on Page 2
as the home of the God of Creation. The ranch name “Osa” translates to bear in Spanish and was derived from the bears that once roamed the rugged hills in the area. “The earliest record of the ranch being called Rancho de la Osa dates to 1846,” says Paul Bear, coowner of the ranch who has studied the history of the area for six years. By the early 1700s the primitive village had become Spanish territory, and the settlement attracted the Jesuit missionaries who established a mission outpost, convenient for