As we looked up at the heights of the mesa, we could see teeny tiny people atop it and, while it was hard to envision how it would happen, it was clear we had just chosen to scale it. Yikes!
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We drove for about two and a half hours to reach Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The first twenty minutes or so of the drive, down from the heights of Lincoln National Forest, were pretty and filled with trees. For the next two hours, our route took us along the east and then north sides of the Tularosa Basin, home of the White Sands Missile Range. The route was, in a word, desolate. Driving for two hours with basically nothing in any direction left me feeling isolated, as if our car’s interior was the entire world.
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We spent the fifth day of our trip exploring spots very near to our accommodation in Cloudcroft, nestled in the Lincoln National Forest. In fact, one of our destinations was even walkable from our B&B! You would think that our elevation in Cloudcroft - about 8,600 feet - was plenty high enough but no, we headed further up into the mountains, a far cry from the prior day’s visit to the low elevation of the desert!
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We have both had multiple opportunities as children and adults to view various petroglyphs around the United States and still find them fascinating and mesmerizing. For those less familiar, a petroglyph is a general term for any (human-made) rock carving, typically noteworthy for those from the pre-historic era. Petroglyphs, often referred to as “carvings” outside of the United States, were often made by using a chisel and hammerstone (or similar objects) to carve away the surface of the rock-face, leaving behind the lighter-colored rock underneath, thus illuminating the image.
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For those readers unfamiliar with Roswell, it holds a place in popular imagination for some or as practically a holy mecca for others. What is certain is that in 1947, something crashed to the earth and a cattle rancher discovered it in his field, located about 75 miles outside of the city of Roswell.
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The best way to describe Living Desert State Park is as a desert botanical garden and zoo. Near the parking lot is a visitor’s center that includes all of the highlights of state park visitors’ center: information to read about the area, interactive displays, animal skeletons, and other touchable items. The back exit of the visitor’s center opens out to the 1.3 mile self-guided trek through a microcosm of the Chihuahuan Desert.
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The Guadalupe Mountains stand as a big, bulky mass rising out of the otherwise endlessly flat landscape of west Texas. They are startling and unexpected. The mountain range is also enormous, home to the highest peak in all of Texas, Guadalupe Peak, which measures 8,751 feet. For anyone who has ever been in a desert, grassland, or anywhere else that is very, very flat, you have likely experienced the inability to understand size and distance. Without any reference points, a mountain can appear close, and you can still spend an hour or more driving towards it. This was definitely our experience of these particular mountains!
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Enchanting is a word often used to describe New Mexico. I’m not certain that the English language has the right word to describe New Mexico, but that one might come closest.
In my years living on the East Coast of the United States, I have come across very few people who have visited New Mexico. Periodic stories emerge in the news about Americans who purportedly think New Mexico is in Mexico. True or exaggerated, those stories hit a very real nerve: New Mexico is probably underappreciated as a destination in the United States.
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