Canyon Clarity: A Cinematographer Creates Her Dream Home in New Mexico

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Building on the granite cliff wasn’t easy, especially for a novice, but Geer embraced the challenge. He scraped off a foot of top dirt, exposing the giant boulder. Then, using a star chisel, he notched two-inch-deep holes into the rock, hammered rebar into the holes, and pinned a two-foot-high stone foundation directly into the cliff face so the cabin walls wouldn’t shift. Even when New Mexico’s spring winds wail, the cabin remains tight and solid.

During the three months it took Geer to build the cabin, he took care to minimize his impact on the land’s fragile ecology—even cutting out indentations in the cabin roof to allow space for existing juniper, piñon, and scrub oak to grow. He dug a pit for an outhouse and cantilevered decking over the cliff, expanding the tiny perch into several outdoor areas with benches and a wood-fired hot tub. A year later he hung a five-foot-round shower room over the rocks a few steps away, framed in fir with a river rock floor. In 1990 he added a third structure: a twelve-foot-diameter sleeping dome with two-foot-thick adobe walls—“straight mud, no wood,” he says proudly. The dome’s curved shape eliminates a flat surface for the sun to hit, thus keeping the space cool during hot summer days.

“I just loved the dome when it was first built, and I wanted everyone to know it was a dome. But it looks too outer space-like to me now,” he confides. “It needs to be squared off, like traditional Islamic domes,” a project he and Dyanna began this past January.

Like the cabin of Dyanna’s youth, this one had only cold running water when it was built. In 1998, shortly after Dyanna moved in, her now- neighbor and partner, Gary Dryzmala, a sculptor, built a fourth structure: a two-story, eight-by-fifteen-foot adobe bathhouse, complete with a tower housing a SunMar composting toilet. A storeroom provides space for an odd assembly of utilities: circuit breakers and solar batteries providing juice for electric lights (supplemented by kerosene lamps) and a gas propane heater providing hot water on demand—a luxury. Gary also built a nearby well/generator house that they call the “pumphouse.” It feeds water to the gravity tank housed in the bathhouse tower. From there, a small solar pump supplies water for the composting toilet and kitchen sink.

A fine little place

Touring the cabin for the first time in years, Geer is impressed with how well the structure has endured. “This is a fine little place,” he says delightedly, rubbing his hand along the rough stone foundation wall. Hand- plastered pale walls are lined and aged. Adobe mud has a timeworn textured look. Cement grout in the foundation still has an orangy tint resulting from bits of pebbles and dirt taken from the arroyos. But it’s the river rock that fascinates Dyanna, who confesses to spending hours staring at the foundation wall, finding “incredible things” in the stone work: fossils, beguiling colors, serpentine shapes, marvelous textures.

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