Location: Alamogordo and Silver City
When: end of April
Miles traveled: 769.7
Price of gas: 3.57 & 4.07
Interest: Mountains
High point: No phone signal in Gila National Forest
Low point: Driving twisty narrow mt. roads
One thing learned: Driving the speed limit or below provides more time to marvel at the changing landscape.
Driving through Texas, cultivated fields showed the red dirt, and other fields were grass lands. At some point the fields mysteriously turned into
hills, mountains, and New Mexico. Driving past desert shrub covered mountains, and then
forested mountains was cool. I
think mountains are easier to marvel at than grass lands. Southern
New Mexico has a lot of mountains!
I stayed one night in
Roswell, where aliens can be found on every street, and then drove past
Ruidoso Downs, a town known for their carved wood bears, before arriving
in Alamogordo and camping at the base of a mountain. The
sun arose above those mountains at 8am, and there were no trees tall enough to
provide shade during the day. This lack of shade accented the power of
clouds, which occasionally cast their dark shadows over me and the
land, and it was neat to watch the shadows move across the desert.
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Dog Canyon Trail
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While
in Alamogordo, I hiked part of Dog Canyon Trail, up the western side of
the Sacramento Mts. It was weird to hike in a part of a National Forest
that does not have any trees, but the views were nice. Pictures, or at
least cell phone pictures, can not rightly capture the beauty of
mountains and surrounding nature. My pictures just don't do the
mountains justice. And from the mountains, I could see White Sands National Park in the distance. I
went sledding in the park the next day.
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The dark mass is a person's head on the other side of a dune.
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Sledding
on sand dunes is not as fun as sledding on snow. (The dunes and
sleds at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, UT were better and almost as
fun as snow!) A very steep dune is needed, but most of the time I still
had to push with my hands to keep moving. Walking in the dunes was disorienting. That area of the park has no plants, and every direction is white. Retracing foot prints was not practical
since the wind wipes them smooth in a few minutes. The "sugar white" sand
is made from gypsum. Rain dissolves gypsum rock from near by mountains,
and it is carried down into the basin below. The water evaporates,
leaving crystals behind, which are slowly broken down by wind into sand size particles.
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| Dunes |
After camping at the base of a
desert mt., my next campground was on a mt. in the Gila National
Forest, north of Silver City. The road from Silver City to Gila Cliff
Dwellings National Monument is narrow, twisty, and stressful to drive as the last part
of a five hour journey. For some reason, it is also a popular biking
route and sections of the road are included in the Tour of the Gila
bike race, which happened to be that weekend. Campgrounds were really
full and I ended up sharing a site with someone who attended the same high school as I did!
In the morning, I managed to leave early enough and was not blocked by
the bike race road barricades.
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Approaching Gila Cliff Dwellings
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Gila Cliff Dwellings
were neat to explore. A short hike travels through the forest up the
cliffs, through the dwellings, then back down again on the other side
following a stream. There were seven interconnected caves the ancient
people built in. I explored them with a fire department team, who were
in town to start a prescribed burn after the bike race was over. A few
ladders let visitors look into rooms that had no visible entrance
without climbing on the brick walls. There are signs requesting
visitors to stay on the paths and not to touch or lean against any
walls. All of the building's roofs were gone, but the holes where the
wood beams supported the roof were visible and some still had wood
sections in them. A smaller dwelling, thought to store supplies or as a
play area for kids, was in a different area. This one was a short walk
away from Lower Scorpion Campground and the trail also leads to a wall
with pictographs.
I hate to end so abruptly, but I am freezing in Panera and need to go warm up outside where it is 91°F.
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Top view of sculpted representation of the dwellings
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| Pictographs |
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Smaller dwellings (and a dog)
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