Grants, New Mexico

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After our stay in Santa Rosa, our next stop was a couple hundred miles along a mostly washboard highway, to Grants, New Mexico. Grants was named for three Canadian brothers who owned and operated mines nearby. They wanted a community for themselves and their workers, and they built a nice little town with some quite elegant homes on the nearby hills.

We stayed at a really nice little KOA RV park. At first glance, the park seems like a wasteland with a few RV sites and a couple buildings. But this park really is a wonderful place to stay for a little while. The owners and managers have really made an effort to make the park something special. First, and most important, the park is really clean and well maintained, both the RV sites as well as the gift shop and the restrooms and showers and laundry. Then, they are very friendly and helpful with just about everything you might need. They have a free pancake breakfast with cereals and coffee or tea, using a nifty little machine that will cook two nice-sized pancakes for you when you wave your hand in front of it, and the perfectly cooked pancakes pop out the end. They also offer a menu of meals they’ll deliver to you at the time you wish during the dinner hours, a service that is really nice after a long day trekking the nearby hills.

The park itself, as well as the whole area around Grants is in the middle of a lava bed. One nice thing this park has is a nice little walking trail through the adjacent desert lava bed. Along the way, they’ve put up signs explaining what you see, and it really is interesting. After just a short stroll along this trail, you would hardly know how close you are to civilization. And except for the really well-maintained trail and the KOA sign that sticks up above most everything, you could easily get lost in the desert.

It seems Grants has about 12 volcanos in the very near vicinity. Mount Taylor is prominent and they say it’s still active, but another prominent nearby volcano erupted scattering its lava 25 miles, and that was the source of the lava around our RV park.

From the RV park, we can see that volcano about 25 miles away. At this volcano is an ice cave, in the middle of the desert. This ice cave is probably the most important tourist attraction in Grants. After driving to the parking for this cave, we walked through the gift shop, paid the fee, and walked maybe a quarter mile of trail through the desert, to the stairway down into the cave. The stairway is 72 crude but solid steps down to a platform just above the ice. And it is absolutely amazing to be at 85-90 degrees in the desert, then after walking down into this cave, it’s freezing cold. The ice is reported to be 100 feet thick. Nature is truly awesome.

After returning to the gift shop, we decided to take the stroll the other way, up the hill to the volcano crater. However, after we had walked a fair distance uphill in the heat, we decided we didn’t need to get all the way. Even though the trail was clear and easy walking, it was a tough walk, and the top was still a long way away. So, we decided we could live without actually seeing the crater.

Even so, it was a very interesting little stroll through a forest very different from the Pacific Northwest forests we used to know. The trees are just different, but the scent of fresh pine and evergreen is really pleasant. The deadfalls look almost like something out of the headless horseman graphics we’ve seen in old novels and movies.



I don’t know where or how Natalie heard about it, but she’s always on the lookout for aviation related stuff, knowing my interest in it. She learned about a historic site in Grants with something I had never even heard of since my knowledge came from more recent training than the late 1920’s.

It seems there was a method of navigating an aircraft across the country at night in the early days of airmail and passenger air travel, and it was based on bright lights at intervals along common air routes. And one of the waypoints was in Grants. Some historical hobbyists found remnants of waypoints and rebuilt or restored the site in Grants.

Each waypoint consisted of a tower with bright lights, one just a light to be seen for a good long distance, and a light showing the way to go to find the next waypoint. At the base of each tower, there was a small building with a small generator and the electrical control system to keep the lights lit at night. On the ground was a concrete arrow also pointing the way to fly to the next waypoint. Later versions of these waypoints were brightly colored, orange and white, arrows made from sheet metal, all mounted a couple feet off the ground and above any wind-blown leaves or other detritus. But the arrows still called for regular maintenance to make sure they were not obscured by dust or snow, and easily visible to the pilots.

While they were at it, they created a little bitty museum about some of the broader history of air travel and aerial photography, right there at the airport in Grants. Some of the museum was inside the small building that had held the generator and electrical system, while the main part was in a nearby building.

Charles Lindbergh was very involved in setting up the Transcontinental Air Transport system. And the museum gave a little bit of an introduction to ideas long since forgotten but integral to the evolution of our current air traffic system. And our visit proved very interesting.

And then it was time to move along to Holbrook, Arizona. That story is next.

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