Monday, 22 November 2021
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| today's route |
I heard on the radio that there's a watercolor society in New Mexico. The news item was about them looking for an artist-in-residence or something - I was busy driving and couldn't write it down. But I've looked at their website and found a pretty active group of artists. https://nmwatercolorsociety.org
The road I had to focus on was miles and miles of climbing road with curves and s-curves and 1 switchback. As far as I could see, there were high hills covered in yellow grass and sage. It was really pretty.
I came to Hillsboro, elev. 5,180' (appropriately named - I started this drive at Caballo at 4,245'). A sign told me I could turn to go to the Hillsboro Historic District, and another sign told me the town was founded in the 1870s when gold and silver were discovered in the nearby mountains. It became an important mining and ranching center, was the county seat for a while, and claims to have had the last operating stage line in the US.
Nearby was another historic marker, this one for Sadie Orchard, which I assumed was someone's fruit trees. Boy was that assumption wrong. I can't paraphrase this and do it justice - you'll have to read for yourself about this colorful slice of history. https://www.hmdb.org/Sadie-Orchard
From Hillsboro, the road started going down, around more curves and s-curves. I crossed Percha Creek via a bridge that suddenly took me over a very deep canyon. There wasn't a road marker about it and I don't know why not. It was dramatic and beautiful and very short. Online I found a trail site that talks about hiking Percha Box, which is what I think I saw. The site says it's 5.4 miles long, beautiful and a place to watch out for rattlesnakes.
I saw some of those loose cow signs (and saw 2 loose cows), and passed a huge wall of pink rock.
The town of Kingston, established 1882, is the Home of the Spit & Whittle Club. I had to look it up and learned it's one of the oldest continually active social clubs in the western US, dating back to the 1880s during the mining boom when Kingston was (they claim) the largest town in the NM Territory. It sounds like now they mostly have fun.
At Kingston I saw a sign telling me I was entering the Gila National Forest, and the road began climbing again. Between Kingston at 6,224' and Emory Pass at 8,228', I negotiated a total of at least 12 hairpin turns (there were 5 in a row, 3 in a row, 4 in a row - I lost count) plus constant s-curves. It was a serious stretch of road and part way through, one of my contact lenses got something in it so I was half-blind for many of those curves. There were almost no pullouts along that stretch until I got to the top of the pass.
I saw what I thought were Bluebirds flying across the road - 4 of them. And they might have been. Here's what a Mountain Bluebird looks like.
You can't tell from these photos, but the jay is 10½" while the bluebird is 7¼". Because of the size difference, I'm going with bluebird as what I saw, but trying to identify a bird while driving that crazy road - well, it's just a guess. Both pretty birds, though, aren't they? And the birds I saw were a welcome blue sight in all those green trees and rocks.
The US Forest Service has several campgrounds along this road in the Gila National Forest, and we stopped at one of them - Iron Creek - to stretch our legs. I saw a youngish couple jogging along a track that led right beside where we were, along with their dog - maybe a Shepherd mix. The fact that it was off leash made me glad we hadn't already left the RV, and I waited until they'd gone by. I mention this because that dog was absolutely joyous. Bounding around and sniffing everything and clearly ecstatic to be running along out in Nature with his people. Impossible not to smile, watching him.
We had a nice walk, though I was afraid to go down that track in case they came back, so we just walked around the small camping area. I heard several woodpeckers, and I'm guessing Hairy Woodpeckers because they're almost the only species that's supposed to be here this time of year, and because the bird book says they're the only woodpeckers to expect in dense forests, which this was. It would have been easier if I'd been able to see them.
From there, the road narrowed mostly because of unpruned junipers and rock overhangs taking up valuable road space. I was lucky in that all day I saw almost no other cars. I counted 15 or so that were eastbound, 1 that I overtook going west, and another that was parked. With all those hairpin turns, I can understand commercial drivers wouldn't want to come this way, but I was surprised there were so few regular drivers.
Just past the turn for the town of San Lorenzo, I saw a sign telling me I'd joined Trail of the Mountain Spirits National Scenic Byway. I'd never heard of this so I looked it up and learned, among other things, that the Gila National Forest includes the Gila Wilderness, which was the first in the US to be designated a national wilderness area. Here's a couple of websites that describe the byway more fully. https://www.newmexico.org/trail-of-the-mountain-spirits https://www.byways.org/trail-of-the-mountain-spirits-scenic-byway
This byway also follows part of an annual bike race called Tour of the Gila, and I'll tell you how very glad I was not to have been driving here during that race. This road would be impossible to drive if I had to share it with a bunch of racing bikes. And apparently it was a near thing. This year's race was canceled due to Covid, but it's usually held right around Thanksgiving and has been scheduled for 2022 to begin on Black Friday.
And the road started climbing again, and I saw what looked like a big blue rock of a mountain. And the closer I got, the more it still looked blue.
There was no place to pull over to take a photo, so I grabbed this one from the only place I could find. I can't find anything about it online, but maybe you can see that that chunk of rock is bluish, in contrast to the tan surrounding rocks. Strange.
I saw what looked like a mining operation, though I didn't see a sign. There were very high hills with lots of green and red rocks (which I learned in Utah might mean copper and iron). And then I passed a sign directing me to the Santa Rita Mine Observation Area. All I knew was that the AAA map said Santa Rita was a ghost town, so I looked it up. According to this web page https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/santa-rita-nm, the Santa Rita Mine is a monster open pit copper mine that swallowed up the old town of Santa Rita. So according to them, Santa Rita isn't just a ghost town, it's now nonexistent.
At the town of Santa Clara, elev. 5,950', I passed a turn to the right for Ft. Bayard National Historic Landmark District, and a turn to the left for the town of Bayard. Ft. Bayard was established in 1866 and now consists of nothing more than a national cemetery. Because Bayard is off the main road, I didn't see it but am guessing it's a farming community. Their Wikipedia page is silent regarding the local economy, but it's lost nearly 20% of its population in the last 20 years and there doesn't seem to be much going on economically around here - except the Santa Rita mine, I guess.
Just a few miles farther along, I came to Silver City, elev. 5900', Gateway to the Continental Divide Trail, they say. I've seen these signs before in other states but don't remember looking it up. You might want to take a look at this website https://www.greenbelly.co/continental-divide-trail-map that's aimed mainly at potential hikers, but there's a map of the trail that's stunning in the territory it crosses. The trail runs between the Canadian and Mexican borders and can reach more than 14,000' in Colorado.
I drove part way into town, looking for a place to stop and take a walk and have some lunch. It was only 11:00 when we got there, which I thought was too early to try to check in at the campground. I followed signs for the county courthouse but found an empty church parking lot first so we stopped there. In that short distance I learned that Silver City deliberately times its traffic lights to stop traffic. Somebody should tell them that a better way of slowing down cars is to time the lights to turn green exactly when a car that's traveling at the speed limit would arrive at the light. Tacoma, WA, did that, and downtown Austin, TX, also used to be like that (not sure if it still is), and it worked well and reduced frustration among drivers, not to mention cutting down on carbon emissions from idling motors.
And then on to the campground, where we had a reservation through Thanksgiving.
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