Main gate on the irrigation ditch

It's just always been there. Never gave much thought about who it belonged to. Simply assumed it was part of the lot next to the road. I started the irrigation in the rain late in the afternoon, and then cranked up the old truck and drove up the road to cut down some weeds that had grown large and started to creep their way into the road. I cut the weeds on the north side of the road, loaded them into the back of the truck, and started whacking down some of the shorter weeds growing on the south side of the road. I worked my way up to the old cattle ramp near the top of the road, and noticed a recent surveyor's stake stuck in the ground designating where the property owners planned on splitting the lot on the south side of the road, and marking where the northern and southern edges of our properties meet. I looked west from the survey marker and noticed the old cattle ramp is sitting on our property according to where the stake is set.

After I finished with the weeds, I drove them back to the lower forty and piled them in a long standing weed pile. Then I went inside, pulled out the survey we had done a couple of years ago, located the survey rebar on the plat, grabbed a tape measure, walked back up the road, found the survey markers from our survey on the north side of the road, measured out 20 feet from the markers, and, sure enough, the cattle ramp is on our property.

"Why is there an old cattle ramp at the top of your road?" You might ask, and it would be a good question. The person who owned the lot at the top of the road fifty years ago had cattle on it. He had a cattle feeder that ran the width of the lot south of the cattle ramp (it's mostly still there, aging like the ramp), and the cattle ramp was there to load cattle on trucks to take them to market. The original property we are on did not have a road coming in from the west. My parents accessed the property from the ditch bank shown in the first two photos. My parents did some dealing, swapping and buying to get the road and better access to the property from Corrales Road, the main road that runs north and south through Corrales. Like I said, the cattle ramp has been there as long as I can remember, and if there was any assumption about ownership, everyone assumed it was part of the lot on the south side of the road, but, as I discovered today, that is not the case. The ramp sits on our property, so we must assume ownership of it and take responsibility for it.

Now we have to decide what to do about the old cattle ramp. One neighbor who lives along our road wanted to tear it down some years ago, but the property owner of the lot next to the cattle ramp assumed it was on his property and said no. While I was working on the weeds, another neighbor stopped to talk on his way out and said he liked the cattle ramp and wanted me to keep it there. The quandary is that the old cattle ramp is leaning toward the road and if it falls over it will temporarily block the road. So I was thinking I should either take it down before it falls over, or straighten it up and stabilize it so it doesn't fall over. I'm leaning (kind of like the old cattle ramp) towards straightening it up and stabilizing it at the moment.

I was thinking that if I stabilized it, I could put planks on the ramp, get some bulls, run the bulls down the road, up the ramp, and into the back of the truck, and then drive them back to the lower forty. It would be fun to have a "running of the bulls" on the road every now and then.

Our gate in on the left. It started raining hard when I walked out to open our gate.

Our old Ford F100 full of weeds.

The old cattle ramp from behind, looking toward the west.

The old cattle ramp from the front looking toward the southeast.