I’ll post about the Texas portion of the journey in a few days.
City of Rocks State Park
This little gem of a rock playground stands out from the Chihuahuan Desert southeast of Silver City, New Mexico. You can walk and scramble through a highly eroded set of tuff formations offset by gray and Emory oak and clumps of yucca. Eroding of fractures over the millennia had produced a series of natural pathways. The campground here is a destination in itself, with the sites nestled privately among the big boulders.
Gila Cliff Dwellings
A winding, paved forest road takes you north of Silver City to this national monument that preserves the remains of a Mogollon redoubt constructed around 1275. The occupants were perhaps on the run and seeking a hiding place; they vacated their overhang only about twenty years later. Before the site became a national monument, it was looted of artifacts, but archeologists did find evidence of a previous occupation around 500 A.D.
White Sands National Park
The dunes here are formed of gypsum sands from an ancient sea floor. There are short trails through semi-stabilized dunes which support a variety of plant and animal life. A loop drive on packed gypsum takes you to the “dune sea”, where you can get out and massage your bare feet for trackless miles if you wish (but don’t stray into the missile range), the San Andres Mountains to the west being a sort of directional reminder.
Carlsbad Caverns National Park
If you begin at the natural entrance, you can wander a route down the main corridor and then make a loop around the Big Room, an eight-acre cavern of spectacular stalagmites, helictites, stalactites, draperies, columns, and flowstone. In all, we walked a total of 2 ½ miles underground, masks required, and returned to the surface via the elevator.
We spent the afternoon above ground, hiking down into Rattlesnake Canyon. The area is part of the Guadalupe Mountains, an ancient Permian coral reef full of fossils. The reef once fringed the Delaware Sea, which formed the western section of the oil-rich Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas.
