A Little Town In The Vale

  In the western part of New Mexico is a charming little town called Ramah. Ramah is one of the towns that were settled by Mormon pioneers under the direction of Brigham Young in their effort to colonize a "pathway" from Salt Lake City all the way down to Mexico. The Mormon Church settled fifty towns in New Mexico Territory in the 1860s and 1870s. Today, only four of them remain. Ramah is one of them. The other three are located next door to each other just west of Farmington in the northwest corner of the state. They are Kirtland, Fruitland and Waterflow. Kirtland is by far the biggest of these towns with about 6,000 people.
  Ramah was named after a chapter in the Book of Mormon. Although maps tend to show Ramah on an Indian Reservation, it is not. Some maps place it on the Zuni Reservation while other maps place it on the Ramah Navajo Reservation, which is a disjunct portion of the much larger Navajo Indian Reservation that lies mostly in Arizona, but also occupies a considerable part of New Mexico and a smaller portion of Utah. Ramah is located on a small strip that lies between the Ramah Navajo and Zuni Indian Reservations that is four miles wide. This strip is also thirteen miles long, from north to south.  This strip is bounded by the Ramah Navajo and Zuni Reservations on the south, at the point where they two reservations join, and the Cibola National Forest on the north.  One mile east of Ramah is the boundary of the Ramah Navajo Indian Reservation. This point is also the boundary between McKinley and Cibola Counties. Ramah is in McKinley County. McKinley is the poorest county in New Mexico and one of the poorest in the nation. Cibola is also one of New Mexico's poorest counties. I believe it is the fourth poorest, after McKinley, Luna and Guadalupe. 
  The first time I ever went through Ramah was in the mid 1990s and I instantly fell in love with the town! For several years, I made it a point to go through Ramah on my vacations. The first time I went through there was because I wanted to take an alternative route eastward instead of the heavily traveled Interstate 40. After going through Ramah every year for about six or seven years, I did not go through it in the fall of 2002 but then went through there again a year later. However, my recent trip through Ramah was my first visit to the town since 2003, eight years ago.