Acoma

Hitting the road at 6:30 is generally an occasion for breakfast burritos from Blakes and a cheap gas-station cappuccino. We deviated from tradition today due to sheer excitement for the upcoming trip. We planned to traverse a national forest, step back through history in a ghost town, see one of the first National Recreation areas, and chase down a few caches along the way. Of course, that omission of the filling station stop before leaving Albuquerque necessitated on just down the road. We zipped past Route 66 casino, and flew past Dancing Eagle, choosing to stop in Acoma for fuel and breakfast at Sky City’s Huwaka restaurant. Next time we will follow tradition or at least past over Huwaka (see our Food page or Yelp review).

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I can’t be certain that the morning’s frustrations can all be traced to our departure from tradition, but my superstitious lizard-brain wants desperately to make that connection. We crossed a good hundred miles of the most dramatic landscapes, from thick, black ropes of hardened lava, to stark stone sculpted into fantastical formations by millennia of wild winds and waters, to … of forested hillsides staked higher and higher one behind the next to the farthest horizon all without finding a single good vintage point to stop and capture the image. Thus, we have a few, if any photos of the savage beauty of the wilderness between Acoma and Alma.

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Raz twisted my arm until I agreed to go in with him at the Apache Creek general store to look for coffee and snacks. I was deeply happy in gave in when we found mint chocolate ice cream bars. We fell in love with them in the UK, and had not seen them on any trip through the States in the intervening years. Today, however, we were gloriously successful in a completely unlikely back-road waystation of rural New Mexico. The Land of Enchantment can truly seem to have everything if one looks hard enough!

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Alma/Mogollon

That momentary victory held our spirits buoyed through the reminder of the frustrating missed photo-ops the rest of the way to Alma. We stopped in at the general store there to get local perspective on the best route to see both the Mogollon Ghost town and the Catwalk National Recreation Area. It turns out that there is no interconnecting road, so it’s a matter of nine winding miles of mountain path into Mogollon, and nine back before heading down the highway to Glenwood for the turn-off to the Catwalk. After some pleasant conversation and an impulse buy of jellies (Prickly Pear and Mesquite Bean) to try later, we finally declared an end to our streak of missed pictures by just stopping in the middle of an otherwise unpopulated road to catch the perfect shot. I recommend highly against anyone doing this, as my heart stopped and cringed in a dark corner of my rib cage when we did so on the barely-paved game-trail that serves as the only road into Mogollon. I can only hope the images will be worth my irrational terror in obtaining them.

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The remains of Mogollon itself are interesting and worth coming back for as primary destination during the appropriate tourist season. Alas, the businesses in the town are only open between May and August, though the weather is perfect for the visit in April. The wise April traveler will learn from our mistakes and stop at the single diner in Alma for lunch, as there is none to be had in Mogollon. Come May, Mogollon has the best rated restaurant in a 60-mile radius, but we weren’t about to wait there a week or two for it to open.

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Glenwood

We determined to try our luck in Glenwood, as we were feeling peckish. Again, however, we were stunned by the seasonal nature of tourism-driven business in rural New Mexico. Thus, we found ourselves wandering the recently rebuilt catwalks winding over Whitewater canyon on an empty stomach. If I recall, it’s Napoleon Bonaparte who famously claimed that an army marches on its stomach. The concept is no less true for our adventuresome cachers who cache on theirs. By the time we pushed past the warning signs for un-maintained trail, hopped, skipped, and jumped across teetering stones to ford Whitewater creek, and climbed a couple badly broken stone stairways, our guts were growling audibly. Before we could become faint from our inadvertent fasting, we called it a day and piled up in the Outback to head south for dinner. We even skipped over a planned cache that would have led us to greater exploration of the Gila National Forest. We contented ourselves to watch the tall pines give way to plains of scrub, then the sharp peaks of the Mogollon Mountains through the windows of our geomobile as we fled with all haste toward the oasis of Silver City.

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Silver City

We paused only briefly to check into the Copper Manner Motel and congratulate ourselves on scoring twice the standard motel room for half the price of any major chain in the town, before wending our way through the drunken-mule carved streets to find somewhere to sate our ravenous bellies. All reviews of eateries here in Silver City are seriously mixed, so we had no expectations, as we chose Diane’s restaurant from the list of possibilities. If we’d expected the moon, though, Diane’s would still have exceeded. Wow!

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We explored downtown a little after dinner, marveling at the excessively high sidewalks, and the aptly named “Big Ditch” that replaces what was once Main Street. Turns out, all of old Silver City was built on the floodplains for seasonal runoff. The original main street and much of its business district were devastated around the end of the 19th century by a massive flash flood. In true New Mexican style, however, the city turned the gaping chasm into a park and put front facades on the back of existing buildings, turning a former alley into the new central thoroughfare. Crescit eundo, my fellow statesmen, crescit eundo!

Around 0700 or so, we bid farewell to Silver City and rode off into the sunrise. We were fortunate in the late-ish start (for us) to the morning, as the brilliant Southern New Mexico sun was high enough for the vehicle’s sun visor to be useful. Any earlier to our start and we would have risked sun-blindness. We were still early enough, though, that we opted to forego breakfast due to too few available options. Most eateries in Silver City that are recommended for breakfast appear to have 0800-1400 schedules on Sunday, but we were just too excited to meet the open road to wait. Or it may be that we were still full from last night’s amazing dinner…

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Either way, we made excellent time on completely deserted streets and highways, even with frequent stops to hop out, stretch our legs, hunt caches, and admire the truly glorious morning. While dry creek beds outnumbered wet ones at least 5-1, demonstrating the overall desert nature of our Southern counties, the undulating hills rolled out pale green in every direction, dotted liberally with deep blue-green scrub, attesting to recent precipitation and avid conservation and reclamation work. I recall travel through the Southernmost stretches of this state in my youth being ever marked with screaming, dust-laden wind-walls that could quite literally peel the paint from a vehicle left out in them for too long. I also remember barbed wire fences plastered with tumbleweeds and trash holding back slowly migrating sand dunes. Every trip involved a discussion at some point about the fragility of the environment and the vast harm of over-farming over-grazing and litter. Apparently, every one of my generation got the same object lessons, because there was not a single stray candy wrapper, nor the glitter of even one bottle along any roadside we traveled today.

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Gila National Forest

When we parked at the myriad pull-outs along the climb up the foothills and mountainsides of lower Gila National Forest, we didn’t see camp leavings or any sprouting of invasive species. What we did see were thin-trunked pines marching endlessly up mountainsides and prickly pears stretching precariously from hard-rock cliff faces. This morning was a perfect time to be outside beneath the trees, the soft breeze carrying the subtle bouquet of sharp pine needles and sweet, almost vanilla-like undertone of the bark of these old trees. The cries of hawks circling high overhead mingled beautifully with the thousand different songs of seed- and insect-forgoing birds flitting through the forest canopy and the merry babble of the handful of small creeks carrying the very last of the spring runoff into the bright green valleys below.

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Watching the subtle play of light and shadow paint bare cliffs towering miles high to either side while listening to the subtle song of a stream invisible through the forest below is humbling and inspires awe in even the most jaded heart. The heart soars with joy as each curve of the winding mountain path reveals towering trees, babbling books, or the intrepid herd of deer. But then the heart stops cold in mid-beat as a curve reveals an entire mountainside of skeletal tree trunks, thrusting into the sky from a barren slope like the quills of a hedgehog with a horrid case of mange. While sage brush, juniper scrub, and prairie grasses have covered most of the black surface scars of the fires which ranged here half a decade back, the sheer cliff sides are still marked by the smoke stains. Barren mountains and skeletal ghost forests stretch into the distance where I remember mist-shadowed forest being in my youth. The melancholy of the massive burn scar across the Gila, that may never entirely heal, lingers with me all the way to Truth or Consequences.

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Truth or Consequences

Raz had visited this amusingly named enclave a few times, but this was my first. Long before this town re-named itself as a publicity stunt for a TV show, it was founded as the town of hot Hot Springs, as it holds a great many natural examples of this phenomenon. Today was much too warm to try any, but we had a nice chat with a couple from Santa Fe about the options while we enjoyed the creations at Passion Pie Café. Or bellies full, and the joie de vivre restored by wild wafflewitches and succulent blackberry pies, we took away pastries for the road and made the voyage up I-25 home with only the briefest of caching stops.

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