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Destinations (Places to Go)
Last updated on Monday, February 24, 2003
Christmas events occur in villages, towns and cities throughout Southern New Mexico. Christmas light parades, concerts, chorales, gallery open houses, home tours, 10K runs, a night light golf tourney, a hoedown, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, an 1872 gunfight re-enactment, the Last Great Cattle Drive, and a myriad of other events are available for your enjoyment. Where are they occurring?
The high valley in which the tiny town of Luna, New Mexico, sits is surpassingly beautiful. The San Francisco River courses by under enormous cottonwood trees, and the green valley stretches between piney mountains. Luna itself, rustic and basic, could hail from an era when cowpokes rode alongside their herds, ropes a-twirl, spurs flashing in the sunlight.
Actually, an even more radical time shift is required of the visitor who would take in everything Luna has to offer. With the re-opening of the Hough Ruin (pronounced HUFF), one must stretch one's imagination 700 years back in time, when another civilization peopled this lovely valley.
Where once cattle grazed and cowboys drove their livestock to market, the Plains of San Augustin near Magdalena, New Mexico, have become a mecca for hi-tech science and astronomical research. How strange it would have seemed to those ranchers of a century ago to now find this stretch of desert occupied by these strange, tall, bowl-shaped structures pointing into the sky, never dreaming of the purpose behind them.Today, this vast, arid desert valley is now home to the most powerful radio telescope in the world, the Very Large Array. With its twenty-seven dish antennas, each connected to the other, spread out over 22 miles in a "Y" formation, the Very Large Array, or VLA, is capable of detecting extremely faint radio emissions from the distant stars.
The Valley of Fires, four miles west of Carrizozo on U. S. 380 is one of the youngest and best preserved lava fields in the continental United States. Yet it is little publicized. It was established as a State Park in 1966 but is now administered by the Bureau of Land Management. Known also as the Carrizozo Malpais (badlands), it was formed between 1500 and 2000 years ago when Little Black Peak erupted pouring molten lava for forty-four miles southwest through the valley. It isn't a volcano per se since the lava flowed via vents, burying almost everything in its path. One hundred sixty-five feet deep at the thickest point, the formation is between two and five miles wide.
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