Meling Guest Ranch, founded since 1913, Aida Meling, Ensenada B.C.

    A ida Meling, the tough and charming matriarch of the remote Baja California guest and cattle ranch that bears her family name has died of a heart attack. She was 82. Her death last Friday marks the end of an era at the 2,500 acre Meling Ranch, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra San Pedro Martir. Born and raised on the ranch, Aida Meling ran it for more than four decades, welcoming generations of visitors who came to hunt, fish, ride, or simply rest and gaze at the stars.

    "She was truly one of the very special people in the world as far as making you feel at home," said Bruce Mullen, a San Diego dentist who first visited the ranch as a 12- year-old boy. "She was a very classy, rugged kind of frontier woman."

    She loved to ride horses, to fly in single-engine airplanes, and tell stories about life at Meling Ranch, located 117 miles southeast of Ensenada.

    In an interview earlier this month, she told of seeing wild condors, bighorn sheep and deer roaming the mountains and canyons years ago. Today, the condors are gone, and the sheep and deer have been reduced to almost nothing by illegal hunting. "There used to be everything up here," Miss Meling said. "Why do people have to shoot everything they see?"

    Born in 1915, she was the second child and oldest daughter of Salve Meling, a Norwegian immigrant. Her mother was Alberta Johnson, daughter of a Danish immigrant named Harry Johnson who settled the area to mine gold. Her parents raised cattle on the property. Though it did not start out as a guest ranch, visitors began dropping by as early as the 1920s said Sona Hughs, Meling’s daughter.

    "They’d just follow the road and come in and we’d give them hospitality," said Hughes.
Miss Meling held both Mexican and US citizenship, the daughter said. During Miss Meling’s teenage years, she went to live with relatives in California to attend high school.
While in the United States, she met her first husband, Earl Smith, and brought him back to the ranch. They had two children, Sonia and Philip, divorcing after 11 years.

She remarried a Baja Californian from the Guadalupe Valley named Billy Barre; they had a daughter, Duane, and later divorced.

    From 1955 on, Miss Meling not only ran the lodge, but supervised cattle ranching and farming on the property as well.
"She loved to be outdoors, to have the fields planted, to harvest the bales of hay," said Hughes. "She was always in the corral vaccinating and running the whole show up until one or two years ago."

    Those who visited the ranch hold onto warm memories of Miss Meling. One early friend was George Lindsay, former director of the San Diego Museum of Natural History and retired director of the California Academy of Sciences. He was still a student when he stopped by the ranch six decades ago during a field trip into the San Pedro Martir Mountains.

    "She was a lovely and enthusiastic person", Lindsay recalled. "The ranches remote location did not stop visitors from all over the world from flocking there", said Mullen, the San Diego dentist.
"One time, I was late in coming in from hunting, and Aida had me washing dishes," Mullen recalled. "I turned to the guy washing dishes with me and asked him what he did, and he said he was the governor of Baja."

    Miss Meling remained active until the very end. She felt ill Friday, but refused to see a doctor, her daughter said.
She died as she would have wanted—at the ranch. She was buried Sunday evening at the ranch at the family graveyard.
The ranch will remain in the hands of her three children; Hughes, who lives in Santa Monica; Duane Barre of Vista, and Philip Smith of Bend Oregon.

    Besides her three children, Miss Meling is survived by a brother and sister, Andrew Meling and Mary Carr Saldana of Ensenada; five grandchildren and three great grandchildren.