New Mexico - Day 21 - Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces

Caballo Lake State Park, Caballo

Sunday, 21 November 2021

When I took the dogs out for our 2nd walk this morning, it was just light and we saw a large covey of quail.  They were on both sides of the road we were on and couldn't seem to make up their minds which side they wanted to be on.  There must have been 15 or 20 of them in the batch we saw, and a little after that we saw huge flocks of what looked like more quail flying overhead.

Gambel's Quail

I'm pretty sure this is what we saw.  The male is much more nicely colored than this female, but she looks more like what we saw.  Plus that little plume on her head was so hard to see, it took me a while to realize it was quail we were looking at.

I had a good view of Elephant Butte Reservoir before leaving.  There was a sailboat on the lake and a decent-sized marina.  But it was clear the lake's water level was way down from its usual level, which might make boating hazardous.

today's route

On the road

The 2 state parks I'd been able to find camping spots in for this weekend are, as you can see on the map, almost next to each other.  I decided to run down to Las Cruces for the day, just to try to get a quick look at what it was like, having heard of it for many years.  It was only about 75 miles from the campground.

I drove back through Elephant Butte and, with nothing (like a sign) to separate them, came to Truth or Consequences.  Of course, I grew up when the TV show was popular and wondered about this town.  Its original name was Hot Springs, but the town voted to change the name in 1950 when the show (it was on the radio then) said it would broadcast its 10th anniversary program from the 1st town to change its name to T or C.  And this place won.  And never bothered to change the name back - I think they see it as a tourist draw.

I passed a marker headlined "Magnificent Magnolia" and didn't stop but had to look it up.  It turns out to be one of those notable NM women markers I first saw in Mora.  The marker itself doesn't tell much about this woman, named Magnolia Ellis, but the website established for those markers tells the story of a remarkable woman.  Born in the Texas Hill Country in 1893, she eventually studied pre-med in Lubbock and put her special talent for healing to good use here in Hot Springs/Truth or Consequences.  Here's the web page.   https://www.nmhistoricwomen.org/magnolia-ellis

Not far from Las Cruces, I saw a sign for Spaceport America.  I thought I was making up what it said, but the FAA has apparently licensed this private facility as an actual spaceport.  Virgin Galactic first launched a spaceship from there in 2006, and there've been 300 launches since then.  The public is allowed only as part of tours they offer (and may charge a bundle for, according to a Trip Advisor review).

As I went south, I started seeing cotton still growing in fields.  I saw it all along the road.  Lots of tumbleweed, too.

And I started getting very strong crosswinds and the same time I came to miles and miles of road construction.  The road closures forced me onto the shoulder with its rough road surface for most of that distance, while the winds were shoving me sideways.  Between the road surface and the wind, I was having a very tedious drive.

Las Cruces

There wasn't a sign telling me I was here, but I figured it out anyway.  This is a city with a current population of 111,385, and is NM's 2nd largest, so it was fairly obvious.

Almost as soon as we got off the highway, we found a hike-and-bike trail near the campus.  Lots of other people were out there too, which made me nervous in case a dog would jog into view before I could figure out how to dodge it.  But after I'd pulled stickers out of both the dogs' feet when they got off the trail to sniff a tree, I turned us around and figured we could find somewhere else less sticker-y.

We drove around the campus of New Mexico State University - they're the Aggies - which seemed very pleasant.  It's clearly got an emphasis on agriculture, as we saw small herds of cows and horses, and small fields for crops, all on the campus or right by it.  I passed a section of what was obviously student housing, but they were separate one-story single-family homes.  Actually, I doubt if a family would fit in one of them.  They might have had 2 rooms total plus a bathroom.  I thought the name of the area was Sunderland Housing, but I couldn't find anything about it online so may have read the sign wrong.  The sight took me right back to my days in Austin in old duplexes heavily used by students.

We drove into downtown, where I saw a tall building with the words "Electronic Caregiver" written on the side.  That seemed a little odd to me so I looked it up and learned that's the name of a company, founded 2009 here in Las Cruces, that specializes in various electronic devices for use in the healthcare field.  Based on that building, I'd say the company has been successful.

We squeezed along Main Street, where I saw lots of sidewalk tables outside every restaurant, and a sidewalk wide enough to accommodate them.  It was an attractive scene.

We passed the City Hall, a very fancy-looking building with a big driveway and 2 huge lions guarding the entrance.

Las Cruces looks a lot like other towns I've seen in NM, but it seems like a pleasant place to live.

Back on the road

I decided on the scenic route for the way back north, so I could see some of the little towns along the way.

One thing I noticed all the way north was cotton and pecans.  I guess that's 2 things.  I saw cotton growing and cotton being harvested and cotton just having been harvested or half the field harvested.  Lots and lots of cotton.

And I saw pecan plantations for miles and miles.  Individual orchards as well as huge plantations of them.

I saw goats and horses and crops of some kind.  Between Radium Springs and Hatch I passed Martinez Arena where I saw dozens of horses being ridden in the arena by dozens of men.  Pickups and horse trailers were all standing around, and I saw a crowd of people on the opposite side of the arena from the road.  Something big was going on and I'll bet they were all having fun.

I crossed the Rio Grande twice, and didn't see much water in it either time.

At the town of Radium Springs I saw a sign advertising property for sale: "325 acres - A View With Some Room."  Radium Springs was originally named Fort Selden Springs, for the nearby fort where some Buffalo Soldiers were once stationed.  When a post office was put in, in 1926, the town got a mineral test done of the free-flowing hot springs there, and found they could legally stick "radium" onto their name.  At that time, this was an attraction and many people came here for relief from arthritis and other problems.  The fort had been abandoned in 1891, and radium eventually became less attractive.  But this is still home to about 1,700 people.

I passed the little town of Rincon, which I think means corner in Spanish.  This is your basic farming town with 220 residents.

And then I came to Hatch, world famous for its chiles.  The town, at elev. 4,050', holds an annual World Famous Chile Festival on Labor Day weekend each year, and I assumed mid-November would be too late for chiles.  I assumed wrong.  I saw peppers still growing in fields and mounds of peppers being sorted.  We saw a little park next to another pecan orchard and stopped for a little walk.

Several places along the road I saw a sign that said "Plowing of Roadway Prohibited."  That didn't make sense - who wouldn't want to have the road cleared of snow?  But then I wondered if maybe these signs had been posted near the pecan trees, and maybe whatever NM uses on its roads - like salt - is hard on the trees and the owners didn't want mounds of treated snow near their pecans.

Not far past Hatch I came to a series of tiny towns: Salem, Garfield, Derry and Arrey.  These all looked like farming towns, where I saw large fields of cotton still growing or having been baled (those tightly-wrapped bundles of what look like q-tips), and fields of chiles and hay and more pecans.

I had been surprised all day to see the pecan trees with all their leaves still green and still on, because by now in Texas they'd have lost most of them.  Finally, near Arrey, I saw pecan trees that were losing their leaves.

Just a few miles farther on we came to the entrance of tonight's campground.  But I needed gasoline before driving across the mountains on the next leg of our trip, and I hadn't gotten it in Las Cruces or anywhere else because the price was so much higher than it had been up north.  Still, I didn't want to risk running low on gas in the mountains, so I went up the road in search of a gas station.  That turned out to be a lot harder than I'd thought.

The next town, Caballo, not only didn't have a sign with its name on (I had to guess from its position) but it also didn't have any services, so I kept going north, still on NM-187.  Nothing wrong with the road, really, but it was bumpy and winding and narrow, so I had to pay attention to what I was doing.

I learned there isn't a town north of Caballo until Truth or Consequences, more than 15 miles down the road.  As tired as I was from driving all day and as much as I was ready to find our campsite and get settled in, I was still glad I hadn't let this gas-search wait until setting out on a drive across the mountains.  From T or C, I got on the interstate.  It wasn't a saving in mileage, but it was definitely a saving in wear-and-tear on my patience.

At Caballo Lake State Park, the park office was open, the nice lady gave me a map without asking why I wanted it, and our campsite was fine.  This is a much smaller campground than Elephant Butte, and local businesses had sponsored numerous areas around the campsites where varieties of cactus were planted.  It seemed to me that the last thing this desert-like area needed was more cactus, but somebody thought it was a good idea.

I hadn't made a reservation anywhere for tomorrow night, thinking I might want to stay here a 2nd night.  But after helping the dogs dodge all this cactus, I decided we couldn't be worse off and might be much more comfortable in Silver City, so I called them and they said sure, come early.  So that's what we'll do.