Our story

A place to ride,
with one heck of a backstory

Mammoth Ridge is our property off Dodd Road in Azle, Texas — northwest of Fort Worth, near Eagle Mountain Lake. It’s where we go to ride, work the land, and build whatever we dream up next.

This site is our family archive for the place: the videos and photos we shoot out here all live in the media gallery, viewable from any phone or computer. As the property grows — new trails, new projects, new toys — the archive grows with it.

The owner
Landry Philpot standing in an excavation site holding a trowel
Landry Philpot — owner of Mammoth Ridge, dressed for the backstory
Why “Mammoth Ridge”

The day the land introduced itself

The name isn’t a marketing line — it’s the story that came with the land. We didn’t find the fossils ourselves; we heard about remains believed to be mammoth being found right here, and this corner of Texas backs the story up: Ice Age floodplains along the Trinity River drainage buried animals where they fell, and the ground has been quietly holding onto them ever since.

We’re not fossil hunters, and this isn’t a dig site — it’s a riding property with a forty-thousand-year-old legend attached. But when the land comes with a mammoth story, the place pretty much names itself.

The dig we heard about

A mammoth really did come out of this ground

Whether or not it’s the very find behind our name, the closest documented mammoth dig happened just up the road. In 2017, a landowner clearing ground for a new home between Weatherford and Springtown — the next town over from Azle — hit a Columbian mammoth tusk. Geology students and instructors from Weatherford College spent weeks carefully excavating it, plaster jackets and all.

Want the pictures? A local crew photographed the whole excavation:

And the digs keep happening — as recently as 2024, a ~20,000-year-old Columbian mammoth was excavated at an undisclosed Texas lake with Tarleton State University leading the recovery. Texas ground is still giving up its giants.

Meet the original owner

The Columbian mammoth

The mammoth that roamed Texas was the Columbian mammoth — bigger and less shaggy than its woolly Arctic cousin, grazing open grassland that looked a lot like this ridge still does. When it walked here, an animal twice the height of a person was ordinary scenery.

13 fttall at the shoulder
~10 tonsfull-grown weight
16 ftspiraling tusks
12,000 yrssince the last ones fell

That’s the spirit of the place: enormous, unhurried, and very Texan. We just get to ride on top of it.

See the ridge in motion