LA MADERA TUCKS INTO A NOOK OF green surrounded by sun-burnished canyons. A few houses perch on gnarled, rocky slopes dotted with dark piñon and juniper trees, but most line the valley floor along the Vallecitos and Tusas rivers, near cottonwoods with trunks too big for two people to touch fingers around and fields stacked with bales of hay. Renegade apple trees hug the roadside.
When the lumber mill in La Madera ran from 1914 to 1926, hundreds of people lived in this little valley and in scattered nearby villages. They had stores, schools, libraries, dance halls, and enough people for parades. But after the big pines were all cut and freighted away, the valley drifted into sleepy semiabandonment.
The town, about an hour north of Santa Fe, was a quiet enclave when C.C. Culver arrived 30 years ago to visit her friend, the legendary micaceous clay potter Felipe Ortega. Eventually, in 2010, she bought the land that became Owl Peak Farm, leaning in to a desire to bring people together and feed them.
“I’m an artist. I never thought I’d be a farmer,” Culver explains, showing me around the fields, the rebuilt farmhouse, and the production shed where she mills flour. She’d always worked on a grand scale when painting and printmaking, but
