The Challenge

The DeLorme Company makes incredible road atlases and there is a series of challenges within the geocaching community to hide or find caches on each page of each atlas. Pages containing major population centers are easy, as are pages liberally painted with smaller communities and traced with well-maintained highways. New Mexico, however, contains five national forests, one national grassland, four significant military bases, and two national labs, all of which restrict movement and/or the placement of caches across their lands. Just to complicate matters more, we have 85 mountain ranges of varying degrees of impassibility, a significant stretch of the Chihuiauan desert, and an untold number of other badlands. All of this, and we’re the fifth largest state in the land area! Raz and I aren’t ones to shy away from the challenge, however, so we made plans to explore some of the last remaining pages in our state that we’d not yet cached on.

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Truth or Consequences, NM

Being up with the dawn and on the road to reach the mysteries of DeLorme page 54, we once again skipped our breakfast burrito, determining that we would stop for breakfast in Truth or Consequences (only 2 hours away into the light morning traffic). As with all we have experienced in T or C, the Grapevine Café had serious personality, and welcoming charm. However, the food as Passion Pie Café is definitely more to our liking. We stopped at Passion Pie after breakfast to pick up sweet rolls for the road.

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If you’ve never watch the sun creep slowly over the Eastern horizon, playing hide-and-seek behind myriad mountain ranges while all-but-flying South on I-25, you really should sometime. The red, gold, purple, pink, and amber of sunrise colors at sunrise is just as beautiful as the painting of the same colors at sunset with the added effect of watching distant mountain-shadows recede to reveal the glittering gems of small towns. Having planned no stops until breakfast, we watched this panorama unfold uninterrupted for 150 miles.

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After breakfast, the earnest caching commenced with a stop by Elephant Butte lake to take in the Caballo mountains, one of our short and completely impassible volcanic ranges. They loom darkly over the sparkling waters of the reservoir, adding needed shade to create a swath of green in an otherwise desolate stretch of desert. This is part of the Jornada del Muerto, a stretch of ground so barren, burning, and treacherous that the first Europeans to venture here named it “Journey of the Dead”. The modern highway system has done a lot to tame the dangers of crossing South-Central New Mexico, but a wise traveler still packs a cooler full of fresh water and tops it off the tank before leaving T or C.

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Hatch, NM

Our next stop was in the little town of Hatch, NM, which proclaims itself “Chili Capital of the World”. We were still full from breakfast, so we decided to test that claim at another time and simply seek out some clever caches hidden about in the quiet shade of the local parks. Strangers to our state are often shocked to see the outdoor temperatures registering 85°-90° (29-35 Celsius) at 11 AM. What even we forget from time to time is that a good shade tree and a breeze across the Rio Grande brings the apparent temperature down to very pleasantly. That right there is why people actually live in this region.

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Deming, NM

Onward we ventured toward Deming, not a destination for this trip, merely a way-point. We paused at the historical marker on the say into town to find a cache, and debated stopping for ice cream or cold drinks. When I fired up Yelp to see about a handy dessert spot, however, the first entry was Elisa’s House of Pies and Restaurant. Viewing her possible selection of pies, we came across “Millionaire”, “Shoefly” and “Vinegar”. Intrigued, we decided to stop. We tried the Shoefly and the Millionaire while there, the Vinegar not being on the day’s variety list. If you have not tried these pies, my descriptions will not do them justice. If you have tried them, the names alone will tell you what type of euphoria happened across our taste buds. We are now willing to make Deming a destination just to try Elisa’s other varieties of pies… Oh, and her barbecue. It smelled so good that we had serious debates over whether we could make room in already stuffed bellies just to try a little! We opted against complete gluttony, taking only one slice of buttermilk pie for the road.

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DeLorme page 54

Onward we went, seeking clever caches to lead us to the boarder-wilds of our fiercely beautiful state. We found a cache for our missing page at the Pancho Villa State Park! Alas, the outside temperature was nearing 100° (37°C), and it’s a wilderness park, which means no appreciable shade. Exploring the park will have to be a winter trip. We did take a moment to visit a convenience store in the tiny town of Columbus, NM, and we found a juice made of aloe vera with pulp tossed in. I’m quite certain that I have never had anything so refreshing in entire life. Per the packaging, it’s made in Mexico. That’s perfectly sensible, considering you can stand anywhere in Columbus, NM and hit the border fencing with a well-aimed rock.

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We discussed how pointless the proposed wall would be across this region, considering the Chihuahuan desert stretching so far in every direction from the border, that the curvature of the earth prevents seeing an end to the barren plane. Though, deep down, that may be the point. A great wall, rising precipitously across the desert would provide shelter and shade as well as be an obvious objective halfway across the desert…

We stopped in the uninhabitable wilderness to find a cache. Mind you, this was early May, and the trees at home, 200-300 miles north, are still in spring blossom after a late winter. The wave of desiccated heat hit us the moment we stepped from the Suby. Yucca and mesquite are low plants with sturdy central trunks and merely tremble in heavy winds, thus we were ill prepared for the blast-furnace effect of the unexpectedly roughspring wind bringing parched air screaming across the baked planes of the desert. I imagine this is how my food feels when I put it on the convection cycle in the toaster oven. The closest safe parking spot (and by that, I mean area of visible clay/sandstone bedrock free of mesquite growth) was about a quarter of a mile from the cache coordinates. This after driving a mile or so off the highway on a winding county road that the car GPS didn’t even recognize. The low-lying vegetation does an incredible job of holding the soil in place and keeping this area from becoming a sea of dunes like White Sands, not all that far from here. Even so, we were sandblasted by small particulates and felt downright gritty as we stamped the log and ventured back to the shelter of our vehicle and the ongoing cool refreshment of the aloe vera juice within.

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El Paso, TX

We cut some caches from out intended list that had been added just for fun since the afternoon was only growing hotter and hotter, and not to mention that we’d forgotten to pack our passports, so a venture to Juarez was out of the question. I find it downright worth a chuckle that I have lived almost my entire life within a day’s drive of Juarez, and I’ve never actually visited the city. Of course, had we brought our passports, we likely still would not have visited this trip after the massive traffic back-up and hour-ish wait to cross under the devastated carcass of I-10. There is massive reconstruction going on, and this vital artery of interstate and international trade is closed, gutted, and being entirely replaced. The result of this endeavor for future convenience and speed, as always, being a mass of current frustration, congestion, and delay. I found myself truly gleeful that the next day’s route took us far to the east, and a tiny backroad route north. When we finally reached our night’s lodging, we were hungry, tired, and downright ill-tempered from the heat, grit, and traffic. Of course, this is where we hit further frustration due to insufficient research.

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The best rated steakhouse in El Paso had notations of “classy” ambiance and “dressy” attire necessary. Being New Mexicans, we are spoiled by a concept of fresh denim and formal wear. There are very few restaurants in the entire state where our hiking boots and dusty tees would not be acceptable, however, my recent palpitations over underdressing in Silver City have brought to the fore my paralyzing fear or being impolite. Thus, we had to cross about half the options in El Paso off our list of potentials for dinner. We dropped down to second-choice options and became enamored of the reviews of El Koqui de la Dyer. We plugged the address into the GPS and navigated the tangled mess of roads to cross the city and find dinner. We found the place, only to learn that it was closed for re-launch and would not open for another week! Still determined to actually eat something more substantial than cobbler, cupcake, or tart for dinner, we went back to the list of available dining options. Seeing good ratings at West Texas Chophouse, combined with a notation of casual dress, we retraced most of the path back across El Paso in hopes of good steak. There was about 45 minute wait since we had no reservation, but we were hungry enough and tired enough that sitting at the restaurant was preferable to trying to find yet another option.

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We were glad we waited if for no other reason than the most amazing spinach and artichoke dip either of us has ever eaten. I won’t belabor the details of the rest of the experience here, but I did post a review for more on that story. Finally sated, and once-again in good spirits, we headed back to the El Paso Inn. Raz was asleep before we could watch even a single show together. I was another story. I can’t recall the last time I have truly not sleep a wink all night in a hotel. The bed was comfortable enough, and the linens clean. The problem was the security floodlights for the parking lot. Because of the placement of the lights, it’s actually brighter in the hotel rooms at night than in the middle of the day! The lined curtain that should have helped was too busy blowing about in the breeze from the air conditioner unit immediately beneath it. Turning off the A/C would mean slow-roasting in a brick oven, so I simply gave up on the concept of sleep.

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Raz and I shared the remainder of the amazing spinach & artichoke dip for breakfast, marveling that it was every bit as tasty cold as it was fresh and hot. We also polished off the cobbler we’d picked up at Passion Pie back in T or C. They can bake! We yet to have anything from there that isn't good!

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DeLorme page 56

Looking at the time necessary for the backroads I’d traced to get the second missing DeLorme page for this trip, we did significant recalculation. Neither of us felt up to what might amount to a 14-hour day of travel. Instead, I found a secondary route to a single cache, that would be about an hour to obtain, and we would go home straight up the Rio Grande Valley on excellent freeways. Let me pause right here and explain that finding a secondary route was no small feat. There are a total of 5 caches in the roughly 1000 square mile area covered on the section of the New Mexico DeLorme atlas page 56 we were searching, and my original route brought us within a quarter mile's hike of 3 of them. The fifth and final cache on the necessary page was approximately another 5-10 miles deeper into the middle of nowhere without discernibly marked roads on the atlas. Page 56 is not only the most difficult page to cache on in the New Mexico DeLorme atlas, it's possibly the hardest page of any atlas, since other states created their challenges to exclude pages with no major roads.

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We set off long enough after sunrise that the front visors would be useful, but that meant the convection oven outside our vehicle was already heating up. We crossed swiftly into the next county over in Texas, and found the small county road that would lead us back across the state border to become a small New Mexico county road. We were happy to see pavement for the first five miles, and completely unsurprised when that ended abruptly in dirt and gravel. The unpaved portion of road was eighteen miles one way to the cache. Fortunately about fourteen of that was very well maintained, and the last four, though seriously wash-boarded, had no major boulders or sinkholes. What it did have was a fine layer of pale dust that lifted a rooster-tail behind any vehicle traversing it that was visible for miles, and completely obscured vision within 200 yards of the vehicle directly in front of you. We found this last out the hard way as our greater clearance and light load meant we caught up to a ranch truck hauling water about six miles into the unpaved section of road. Passing was tricky, but we happened across one of the perfectly baked and cleared clay uphill sections of the road, and the rooster-trails dropped away just long enough for us to complete passing. There were no speed limits posted after the road stopped being paved, but the road itself enforced a limit somewhere around 20-30 mph, being full of blind curves and sudden rises and falls, not to mention the washboarding, which made even the brand new suby feel like it would shake itself apart at speeds over 20 mph.

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The benefit of such a road is that the owner of the cache could place a massive container with relatively little camouflage just off the road, and the only potential of it being disturbed would rise from jackrabbits and turkey vultures. The other benefit of such a road is that is impressively photogenic. Had I not been so completely exhausted, the towering figures of yucca standing sentinel upon the raised road bed might have inspired me to poetry. As it was, I left capturing the sense of both splendor and isolation to Raz’s camera rather than my pen.

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I did not precisely sleep for the return trip, as I have great difficulties sleeping in moving vehicles, but I also paid little attention to the natural wonders of sudden mountain ranges and surprise river valleys across desert plains. I rarely miss opportunities to feel the awe and wonder that the vastness and starkness of the beauty of southern New Mexico inspires. Fatigue is a great suppressor of spirit, however.

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Hatch, NM

I did rouse myself from half-dazed stupor as we pulled back through Hatch, NM at lunch time. We had noticed and remarked upon a strange collection of giant concrete road sculptures the previous day. We had not put together at that time that there was a central point to this parade. Today, however, seeing a great like of people snake around a block of buildings to a single, modest doorway watched over by an entire flock of concrete sculptures atop building roofs, we understood. The restaurant is called Sparky’s and the great collection of mid-20th century Americana belongs to it. There is so much in the collection that much of it must line outside permanently. We read Yelp reviews, stating that the huge line is deceptive and the wait is not extreme, and we figured, why not?! It turns out that the dining room for Sparky’s is pretty much the entire block that the line forms around, but ordering is lunch-counter style just inside that unassuming door. Every inch of wall is covered in more of the restaurant’s great collection of kitschy memorabilia, and there is even a concrete Big Boy statue in one the dining areas! I have seen many other restaurants attempt to emulate this concept, but none have ever managed to look as genuine and endearingly earnest in their presentation as this one. Likely because this is not intentional artifice to evoke a certain ambiance in the patron, by the owner’s own collection simply in need of a place to be housed and shared.

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The food is of the same concept. There isn’t a lot of gourmet dressing, it’s simple diner fare prepared well. Yes, there is an element of kitsch here as well, being that everything including the lemonade and shakes have chile options, and there is no main-dish that doesn’t automatically contain green chile. This is Hatch, New Mexico, though. Chile is the town’s livelihood. You can’t avoid it here anymore than you could a fairytale reference at Disneyland. Unlike Disneyland, though, the lines in Hatch move swiftly and you get to take your time and really savor the experience you have just waited for. I was still working on my Yelp review for Sparky’s as we passed through Socorro on our way home, not because of my fatigue, but because I had to bring my endorphin-addled mind back from flights of fanciful description of how very good the chile really is at its source.

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Jornada del Muerto

We made only one more stop on our northbound journey. There is a little rest-stop about 14 miles north of Socorro on I-25. I guess it might technically be two rest stops, as there are near identical covered wooden structures built on high stilts above the surrounding sands, and there is no interconnecting road. A historical marker at the northbound rest area explains the shifting dunes surrounding this section of I-25. We ventured a mere tenth of a mile across them to find a cache, in light winds, and have the deepest of understanding of one more reason why this stretch of desert was given its ominous name. Had the winds been any stronger, the shifting sands could very well tear flesh from bone. I was ever amused at the box-like wooden structures surrounding the picnic tables at the rest area with their tiny windows, looking every bit like a misplaced Ewok village among the dunes. Suddenly, crossing these sands for a cache, I understand that the structure is ideal protection in a high wind. Fatigue caught up with me after this last excursion and I had no more thoughts through the rest of this trip home!