#10 Coveys Great Adventure – Bead Week, El Paso and New Mexico

 April, 2015

From the tranquility of Burro Creek we plunged directly into the hubbub of Bead Week. This year about 125 avid beaders from all over the country converged on the North Ranch Escapees Rainbow Park in Congress, AZ for a week of workshops and camaraderie. Kayeanne gave a class on making knotted string jewelry that was well received, and I joined other bead widowers for a golf tournament (our team tied for first place) and attended an introduction to Tenkara fly fishing. I may try that when we are in the right place. I also caught up on a few coach maintenance projects and took several long walks in the desert with the dogs, where we survived our first real encounter with a rattlesnake. Schroeder was very impressed.

Next stop: El Paso TX, of all places. Texas is a popular choice of residence for people without a fixed address, like us. The Escapees organization provides a number of services that make living on the road much easier and less stressful. We needed to finish establishing our domicile change from California to Texas by completing the vehicle registration safety inspections and getting Texas drivers licenses.   El Paso turned out to be the closest place to do that, so we packed up all the beads and made a long day’s drive to El Paso-West RV Park, about 5 miles south of the Texas-New Mexico border in Anthony,
TX. We had planned to stop off in Deming, NM but the first two parks we checked out were not places we liked, even for one night.

El Paso turned out to be an efficient location to get our administrative stuff done, but no place we wanted to spend time. The RV park was about ideally located on the north side of the city and only a few miles from the Texas Department of Public Safety office, but doesn't have anything else to recommend it. The day after we arrived we ran the coach and van through the Texas vehicle safety inspection; both passed without problems. With inspection certificates in hand, we went to the DPS office and exchanged our CA licenses for new Texas ones. We are now officially pseudo Texans, yahoo.

Great campsites

That done, we wasted no time getting back on the road for more interesting locales. You can’t go through southeastern NM without visiting Carlsbad Caverns. When searching for our next place to stay, we always check out state park campgrounds. Brantley Lake State Park looked like a good home base to explore the area around Carlsbad, visit the Caverns and relax after two pretty hectic weeks. Located several miles north of Carlsbad, the campground sits on a peninsula jutting out into a large man made lake formed when a large dam was constructed to control the periodic, occasionally catastrophic flooding of the Pecos River. We found a great site with an unobstructed view of the south arm of the lake and the dam. For some reason neither of us took any pictures, so I borrowed these.

 

Several more pictures are here. We all enjoyed Brantley Lake and will stay here again the next time we are in this area. The dogs want another crack at the rabbits that seem to carpet the area. I tried to count the ones in view one evening and gave up at 40.

Our main reason to come to Carlsbad was to tour the Caverns. After Kartchner Cavern I was a little blasé about another cave, but this place really lives up to its reputation. The sheer size and extent of the chambers and the infrastructure in place to make them accessible to everyone regardless of physical limitations are really impressive. A few years ago the National Park Service built a large visitor center with a good restaurant, a gift shop, an interesting educational area, and especially welcome, an elevator! Admittance is free with a Senior Pass, one of the few really worthwhile perks of attaining a certain age.

She says I need to show more people,
so here's one standing near the Cavern
entrance

Carlsbad Caverns are “dead” caves, meaning that they are mostly dry and the majority of the formations are no longer growing. In contrast, Kartchner Caverns are living caves and the formations there are still slowly expanding, just as they have for millions of years. Kartchner does not allow self-guided tours (aka wandering about) because the life of the cavern is threatened by the very process of viewing it. Carlsbad offers both ranger guided and self-guided tours; we decided we could handle it ourselves.

There are two routes into or out of the Caverns. We decided to walk in through the original, natural cave entrance and ride the elevator back up. The trail is quite steep in places, descending 750’ in 1.25 miles. Some of the folks we met clearly didn’t read the description of the physical conditioning required for this route and were struggling with the steep descent. When we finally reached the end of the trail at the Big Room we realized that we were only half way done. The tour of the Big Room is another 1.5 miles, gladly it is fairly flat. Yes, it is really big!

My pictures can’t show the almost unbelievable scale of many of the formations and especially the size of the rooms that contain them. In places the roof is over 100 feet above your head and the drop below your feet is almost as far. Handheld cameras (in my hands, anyway) just aren't able to capture that. Here are pictures that do it some justice, but if you haven’t been to the Caverns, make the effort to visit. It is worth it by any measure. We were certainly happy to ride the elevator back to the surface.

We enjoyed staying at Brantley Lake, but it was time to hit the road again. Alamogordo, NM offered a couple of places we wanted to see, the White Sands National Monument and the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Desert Paradise RV Park turned out to be seriously misnamed, but was an adequate home base for a few days.

Pushing the season a little in Cloudcroft, NM

US82 is a very beautiful drive through beautiful, remote country from Artesia, NM to Alamogordo. It passes through the Lincoln National Forest, topping out at almost 9,000’ near Cloudcroft, NM. I think we were pushing the season a little as you can see from the picture we took when we stopped to give the dogs a break. Cloudcroft looks like one of those places we’d like to explore in better weather, so we added it to our list for a revisit.

Space Museum

The Space Museum is a local venture put together by a few enthusiasts and the University of New Mexico. Though small, it has a lot of interesting stuff and is worth an afternoon. We didn’t go to the IMAX film or the planetarium due to scheduling but I later learned that we should have tried harder to see them, too.

No, that's not snow although it sure looks like it

White Sands National Monument has nothing to do with the missile range of similar name that surrounds it, or with the atomic bomb test site. It is hundreds of square miles of pure white gypsum sand dunes rolling across the desert. Some of the dunes are almost 100’ high and the National Park Service sells plastic toboggans for sliding down them. There weren't many people there the day we went, but judging by the piles of toboggans, sliding down the dunes is very popular. As you can see, the dogs just loved this place. There is a small, white lizard that inhabits every bush and Schroeder actually hurt himself trying to catch every one of them.

White Sands at sunset is spectacular

We decided to come back for the evening sunset ranger guided tour and learned a lot about the origins and eco systems of this unique place. The dunes are not silica sand like most of the world’s deserts and beaches. They are formed by powdered gypsum, the same material found in drywall, toothpaste and many other products. Unlike desert sand, gypsum is very good at holding moisture, so like at the beach, water can be found fairly close to the surface.  There are a number of plants, insects and animals that have evolved specific sub-species to successfully adapt to the unique conditions found here. This is a fascinating place, but like the Caverns, I could not capture the scale of it with my small camera. Here are more pictures. If you are in the area, it is certainly worth seeing.

On the road to Ruidoso

One day we decided to take a drive back to the Lincoln National Forest to check out Ruidoso, NM and to just meander . We were a little tired of deserts and needed a change of scenery. We headed north on US70 through Tularosa (the Tularosa Café is a good place to eat), climbing steadily as the road wound  through increasingly rugged and more tree-covered terrain. There was even a little snow on a few of the north-facing slopes.

Ruidoso was a larger town than we expected. It is tucked into a number of small, heavily treed canyons and large ravines, making the streets a little tight. It seems to be a fairly prosperous place, with a mix of tourist oriented businesses and a solid core of year round residents. We didn’t stop, but have added it to our revisit list.

One of the reasons we like to get in the car and just meander are the places we discover. We had never heard of Fort Stanton until we came around a corner and found the Merchant Marine and Military Cemetery seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. It was fascinating and

The Merchant Marine and Military Cemetery
at Fort Stanton, NM

moving to wander the graveyard reading the inscriptions on markers dated from 1900 right up to last month. I certainly don’t envy any of the residents, but I have never seen a more beautiful place to spend eternity.

Fort Stanton itself gave us an insight into a period of history that we had never heard of. Established as a US Army outpost during the Indian wars of the late nineteenth century, the Fort evolved into one of the many sanitariums established throughout the mountains of the Southwest to treat tuberculosis patients. The cool dry air of the Southwest mountain regions was about the only relief available for many decades for the many people who contracted this disease. During WW ll Fort Stanton also served as a POW camp, housing a number of German civilian sailors “lucky” enough to be in US waters when the war broke out. The Fort is an interesting place to visit, and the roads around are great fun to drive.

I know there is a lizard down there

It was a relatively short drive to Las Cruces, our next stop. We liked Las Cruces a lot. It has a strong sense of community that always makes a positive difference in a place. The people we met were clearly happy to live there and proud of their city. The farmer’s market was real fun and Coas Books is one of the best bookstores I’ve ever seen. Sunny Acres RV Park is located just a few blocks from downtown Las Cruces and is one of the better places we have stayed. 

Twice weekly farmer's market in Las Cruces

Old Mesilla Village is worth a visit. Located next door to Las Cruces, it features shops and restaurants around the carefully preserved town square founded in the 1840’s. For many years, Mesilla was the main town serving this region. It is not too “touristy”. We spent a pleasant afternoon browsing the shops and having dinner.

Located about 30 minutes east of Las Cruces is the White Sands Missile Range Museum. We have been testing missiles in this area since the early 1940’s and the museum has dozens of examples of this hardware. It was quite interesting to be able to follow the evolution of the designs as the technology changed through the fifties, and especially into the sixties and seventies. The increasing sophistication is readily apparent.

Just a fraction of the hardware on display

The museum itself is pretty quaint and could use the services of a good curator, but the section on life at the base from 1940 through the 70’s was interesting. Because of its location and mission, the base was a self-contained town, with schools, shops and services like a community pool and a golf course. The museum has a number of displays that depict the lives of the families stationed at what was then a pretty isolated location. I found the contrast between the town’s seemingly ordinary life and the base’s mission of weapons development quite interesting.

The neighborhood at Burro Mountain

As you would guess, Silver City, NM owes its name to the mining that still continues in this mountainous region. As far as I know, no commercial silver or gold mining currently takes place, but open pit copper mines are still operating. While looking for an RV park in Silver City we checked www.rvparkreviews.com, and spotted the only “10” review we had ever seen for a place called Burro Mountain Homestead. We had to see why, so we made a reservation and headed West.

Burro Mountain is located at 7000’ in the Gila National Forest at the end of a seven mile long dirt road. Big RVs like ours are not designed for dirt roads and it took us almost an hour to crawl our way to the Homestead to avoid shaking it to pieces. The coach got really filthy, but the effort was worth it. This is one of those places that turn out to be pretty special. 

One of the neighbors

Roughly 300 year round leased sites are nestled in the trees in the canyons and on the ridges surrounding the central valley where 40 sites are available for “dailies” to rent. Despite the isolation and the winter weather (it snowed one morning) about 40 people live here year round. The rest of the leasees begin to arrive about late May. We were invited to a happy hour at the community fire pit. As you might imagine, everyone there was a character. We had a great time.

The natural setting is quite idyllic. A stream runs the length of the Homestead and a large deer herd wanders at will throughout the property, driving our dogs nuts. The area around the Homestead is open range for cattle grazing. It is a little startling when a section of “brush” starts to amble off as you approach. The cattle really blend in to the terrain!

Free firewood!!

There must be a few hundred miles of dirt roads throughout the area, many of them maintained to one degree or another by the county, the National Forest Service or privately like the last couple of miles into the Homestead. We spent an afternoon following a few of them into places that a minivan wasn't intended to go, but nothing got damaged and we saw some fabulous country. Everyone at the Homestead has at least one ATV and off-roading might be the number one leisure activity.

Silver City was worth visiting. The more modern commercial section had the usual stores and services. The historic downtown area is set up for tourists and has a number of galleries, shops and restaurants to browse and nosh, and the museum was pretty interesting, too. April is not their prime season, so some of the galleries and shops weren't open during the week. We liked Silver City; it had a nice vibe, good services and seemed quite accessible. We look forward to coming again.

On April 27th we pulled out of Burro Mountain bound for Vista, CA for Ted Anderson’s 65^th birthday party and then a week in Simi Valley to catch up with our friends in the area. More soon.