Ronald Rael’s Experiments With Adobe Are Only Getting Started

Ronald Rael dons a big furry hat while he splits logs into small pieces, tossing them into a wheelbarrow. In every direction, clouds swirl. The skies of Colorado’s San Luis Valley grow increasingly dark and ominous, and it begins to snow. Contrary to popular belief, desert climates—especially high-altitude ones like these—aren’t always scorching hot. Rael hauls his load back to the house, kicks off his boots, and takes an armful of the chopped chunks inside. The open kitchen is a toasty refuge from the inclement weather. Rael, who wields a Swiss Army knife of titles, spanning from designer to professor, author, artist, and entrepreneur, opens the steel hatch on the side of his woodburning stove and stokes the fire.

"This was not a place anyone lived full-time," Rael explains of the extreme alpine desert where he grew up. "The Utes didn’t live here. The Navajos didn’t live here. This was merely a hunting ground, a seasonal spot." The territory is characterized as a closed basin, a unique geological formation in which the snowmelt that runs off the southern Rocky Mountains settles directly into the valley below. "There is practically an ocean under us," Rael says. From bitterly cold winters—so cold that Rael remembers newborn calves weaseling their way into the warm house—to swampy springs replete with biblical plagues of mosquitoes and frogs to the finally idyllic summers, this corner of the earth has made human settlement a particular challenge. Nevertheless, some people, including Rael’s ancestors, eventually made a life here.

His great-grandfather, Miguel Francisco Barela, built an adobe home in the tiny unincorporated village of La Florida. A three-room, pitched-roof construction, which transformed into an L-shaped dwelling with a 1960s addition, housed the patriarch and his family for decades. "I grew up with my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my aunts, and my uncles," Rael recalls. "Twenty-five members descended here to eat, and they all lived in the little houses out beyond." Rael looks back with wonder at how his grandmother catered to such a hungry clan mostly from an earth oven outside the house. "She fed the whole town," he smiles.