| New Site | Old Home | Search | Communities | Counties | Southeast | Southwest | |
 |
| |
| ||||||||||||
Outdoors
Last updated on Monday, February 24, 2003
At Jordan Hot Springs, in the Gila Wilderness of southwestern New Mexico, I lie full-length in the warm water. Ringed by ferns and lush vegetation, this deep pool is sheltered against a massive rock covered with spongy moss. The water temperature is about a hundred degrees. Tiny yellow wildflowers bloom at the pool's edge. I look up at a sky patterned in racing clouds and sycamore branches. A swallowtail butterfly circles the stalk of a purple bull thistle. Somewhere, anxiously, a brown towhee trills. A blue jay scoffs. I sink and slide and dream deeper.
If I listen closely - in this dreamy state - I can hear the wilderness whispering around me. Up and down the Gila River comes the murmur of secret lives: caddisflies, dragonflies, damselflies, trout, suckers, tadpoles, toads, lizards, snakes, mice, muskrats, foxes, badgers, bobcats, peccaries. The rare coatimundi drowses in the trees. Further up the canyon, mountain lions and black bears live discreetly. At twilight, after supper, we will surely see deer or a herd of elk.
I think Big Rock is on Gilita Creek, though I’ve never really looked at a map, maybe five miles or so downstream from the Gilita campgrounds. The trail always appears to be well beaten, but we’ve never seen anyone else on it. Seasoned hikers would probably consider it an easy stroll, but for city folks unaccustomed to carrying 20 or 30 pounds on our backs, it’s challenging. You wind your way along the stream, frequently wading to follow the trail markers carved into trees along the path. The scenery is beautiful, the mountain air cool and fragrant, and the only sounds are the birds and the rattlings and squeakings of our backpacks. Finally, you wade the stream for about the hundredth time, climb up the bank and find yourself in a clearing circled by great old trees. Then you see the Big Rock, standing almost like one of those giant stone faces on Easter Island. The landscape of Southern New Mexico, West Texas, and northern Mexico has not always looked like it does today. In fact, beginning some 45 million years ago, parts of the region literally exploded, dramatically altering the shape of things. Time after time, volcanoes in the area erupted, spewing forth immense quantities of thick lava and clouds of boulder-to-dust-sized rock fragments. Torrential rains caused mudflows of volcanic debris to surge off the hillsides, drowning valleys and basins in mucky layers of debris. Lava oozed into horizontal and vertical cracks in the older layers, doming up whole areas, forming peaks, and hardening in rooster-comb-like dikes. The blue skies over Elephant Butte Lake will be dotted with CFO's (colorful flying objects) during the weekend of April 21-22, 2001. Hot air balloons and kites will soar into the sky early Saturday morning, weather permitting, and will repeat their colorful performance early Sunday morning. Located on the southwestern shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir, Elephant Butte offers residents and visitors mild sunny winters, hot summers moderated by afternoon thunderstorms or lake breezes, and practically perfect weather in the spring and fall.Elephant Butte State Park is the state's largest park, with camping, boating, and fishing on the 43 mile long reservoir. Three marinas, numerous marine service and storage facilities along with restaurants, a golf course and lodging facilities serve the many folks who use the lake.
The road heads north, from the pass of El Paso to the cross of Las Cruces and farther to the spot where you turn west and leave the Rio Grande's fertile sides. As you travel towards Hillsboro, the road rolls and twists, breaking the straightness and monotony of the Interstate. Now it's time to pay attention; driving becomes work and fun, a test of your attentive ability. It takes effort to escape; the efforts can test your reactions and the fitness of your vehicle. Small trees start to appear. The feeling of going upward gradually becomes obvious. Dawn has yet to break when we first arrive at White Sands National Monument. It is bitterly cold, the gates won't open until seven, and we are unable to find somebody who can allow us to enter early. Nonetheless, the morning light will reveal the first sand dunes we've ever seen, and "magic hour" for photographers should not be wasted in a motel bed or at a late breakfast. The excitement of finding the first 'color' in your gold pan is an indescribable experience. Even though I had never seen it in its native state before, when I looked down and saw gold in my pan for the first time, I knew instantly what it was. There was no doubt! I exclaimed, "I'll be darn, so that's gold!" A newspaper reporter asked me, "How did you know, did you have it analyzed?" I said, "No, I just knew!" I remembered all those disappointing times I had found only fool's gold (iron pyrite). How could I have missed the real thing! The excitement of finding my first gold was more earth shaking than finding my first love. I truly had 'Gold Fever.' For golfers in Southern New Mexico, there's some good news and some bad news. Sometimes an aspect of the game swings both ways. Hot springs in the Gila vary in their accessibility. A trip to the Middle Fork hot springs, for example, only requires a half hour walk and a couple of river crossings, while others are a full day's hike and an overnight stay away. But whether you're feeling adventurous or mellow, you can always find a chance for a relaxing soak in a beautiful outdoor setting. With a little exploration, visitors can discover quiet, remote springs.It is autumn 1919, in a wild and scenic area of New Mexico's Gila Forest. A young assistant district forester named Aldo Leopold is on horseback, trying to imagine what his surroundings will be like if a proposed road system goes through, a "civilizing" influence becoming all too familiar in other forests of the Southwest.
Not here, he resolves. Something must be done to save it so future generations will be able to enjoy the purity and beauty of this back country.
You say you're bored, the kids are restless, nothing to do! Well, how about spending a day discovering some of New Mexico's great history? This scenic drive will take you to three ancient Indian pueblos and the ruins of three awe-inspiring Spanish mission churches that are some of the most beautiful to be found anywhere in the United States. Along this route you can also hike and play in the Cibola National Forest, bike, camp or fish among the pine, aspen, and maple forests of the Manzano Mountains at Manzano Mountains State Park. On these hot, dry June days when the horizon shimmers, set to dancing by the waves of heat that rise from the ground, I think of beaches. Not ocean beaches - playas -desert beaches. Playas are the dry, incredibly level beds of ancient lakes. Found in desert country throughout the southern Southwest and northern Mexico, and the Great Basin country of western Utah and Nevada, normally-dry playas occasionally fill with a skim of water - sometimes no more than inches deep over many square miles - after a heavy summer rain or spring snowmelt. Such lakes never last more than days or weeks, soon evaporating to leave behind huge expanses of mudflats drying in the sun. Playas were named by Spanish explorers for their resemblance to beaches - very flat beaches. In the realm of travel, nothing can approach a successful river run on good water, with the opportunity for some gamefish along the way. Okay, maybe if we could work some hunting into that river run, too. That should be next. Autumn slips across the desert quietly. Although nights grow chill, summer's heat lingers in the afternoons, and the greenery brought on by summer rains simply fades to dusty olive, bleached straw, and weathered brown. As the soil dries out, mesquites, desert willows, and ocotillo drop their leaves without any fanfare. But here and there where water flows - a spring, stream, an irrigation ditch, or a river - autumn shows in the rich yellows and golds of cottonwood trees. When you visit Southern New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, you'll discover stunning vistas, deep canyons, and high peaks. Stop at a scenic overlook and you're sure to feel the urge to pull out your camera and snap a few shots so you can show friends and family the impressive terrain. But all too often, when you get the film back from the developers, those exciting photos seem flat and uninteresting. They just don't capture the depth and beauty of the scene before you.Summer: 1966. The powdery sand blew off the rock face I was clinging to and into my eyes. I blinked and squinted into the sun, craning my neck up to look up the steeply canted rock.
Through dusty glasses I looked between my outstretched arms at the stretch of the rock face above and suddenly felt utterly alone. I could not see anyone above me, only hot white rock. My fingers were jammed into a crack and my knuckles were bloodless from the grip.
Located in New Mexico's remote boot heel region, Skeleton Canyon begins in the Peloncillo Mountains on the western edge of the Animas Valley and heads northwest by west to a point where about seven rugged miles later, it meets its south fork in nearby Arizona. Tradition has it that the canyon, called Cañon Bonita by the Mexicans, takes it name from the ambush of a Mexican pack train by Curly Bill Brocius' gang of cutthroats in 1882. According to the story, fifteen Mexicans were killed and their bodies left to the scavengers. For years thereafter, their bones provided grisly souvenirs. About 15 years ago, I became the editor of Basin & Range, a short-lived magazine (three issues) based in Silver City. The demise of this periodical is a story unto itself, and not a particularly pleasant one, but the inspiration for the journal is still out there, albeit in somewhat tattered form: the mountain ranges and desert basins of Southwest New Mexico and Southeast Arizona. Life in the desert is patient. This may be your final, succinct observation if you linger long enough in the Chihuahuan Desert of Southern New Mexico. Stay even longer, and the seemingly endless expanse of earth and sky can, in a very unique and mysterious way, be intensely comforting to body and soul - the unapproachable becomes approachable, the forbidding landscape becomes a land of enchantment. So you've decided to explore Southern New Mexico. You have your road maps, a cooler of food and beverages, and jugs of water in the back just in case. You set out across broad basins under an ocean of blue sky, wandering over rugged mountains rising up from the surrounding plains. The rolling massiveness of the Cooks Range, the rocky needles of the Organ Mountains, and the lofty heights of the Mogollons inspire you. You're an idealist. But no matter how romantic your impressions may be, no matter how much the bright sunshine makes the expansive scenery glitter, the chances are what you won't be thinking about is a fortune in gold. As you gaze out over the enchanting vistas, odds are you won't be imagining a long, trailing caravan of Spaniards and Indians trekking over ridges and basins in search of a golden legend. "As we toiled across these sterile plains, where no tree offered its friendly shade, the sun glowing fiercely, and the wind hot from the parched earth - the thought would keep suggesting itself, Is this the land which we have purchased, and are to survey and keep at such a cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless."“These waters, they soothe me. I could stay here." With those words, hope dangled before a New Mexico frontier wracked with Indian wars. Though not within his traditional homeland of southeastern Arizona, Cochise, the venerated and feared Chiricahua Apache leader, liked what Ojo Caliente offered . . . sanctuary and soothing waters to mollify his spirit and body.
Unfortunately, in spite of evidence that the Apache had used Ojo Caliente for generations and that they were willing to settle there peacefully, the U.S. government failed to see the benefits of establishing a permanent reservation. In fact, the Chiricahua were one of the few Apache tribes in the Southwest that did not get their own reservation. The White Mountain Apache, the Jicarilla and the Mescalero all received at least some portion of their traditional homeland as a reservation. Only the Chiricahua were forever banished from the land so dear to them. They were shipped far away to prisons in Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma, never to threaten the Southwest again. One has to wonder if the relocation could have been avoided if only the government had made good on its promise to allow the Chiricahua to live at Ojo Caliente.
A small hump-backed mountain rises above East Mesa, midway between Las Cruces and the Organ Mountains. It is often called "A" Mountain for the Aggies "A" blazed on its west side like a gargantuan modern pictograph. But I prefer its older name, Tortugas, or "Tortoise" Mountain, for its resemblance - when viewed from the south - to a huge tortoise slowly ascending the bajada. At first site, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park in southern New Mexico might seem merely a quiet, off-the-beaten-path, sun-backed stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert. The stillness of the landscape, the massive towering cliffs that form a Hollywood-like set backdrop to the Park, even the occasional, swirling dust clouds that meander through the mesquite and yucca desert might give one the impression of quiet permanence. However, a closer look reveals much more. Is windsurfing a popular sport in this desert land of ours? Travel only as far as Caballo Lake on any breezy day and you can witness a dozen or more windsurfers (also known as boardsailors), sporting wide smiles on their wind-blown faces, as they glide seemingly effortlessly over the white capped waters.
|
||||||||||||