Driving northern NM

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October 25, Monday

This another driving day. We drove from Taos to Santa Fe to Pecos. We wanted to do a section of the Santa Fe Trail, so we were sort of backtracking here. We spent the night in Las Vegas, (not Nevada, Las Vegas) New Mexico. We found a nice little Spanish restaurant, got to a movie and that was it for the day.

October 26, Tuesday
New Mexico

On the road again to Fort Union, then we spent the night in Raton, an old coal town that has sort of gone down the tubes. We rented a video at the Wal-Mart, got our pictures developed, picked up some more supplies. We even found a Carnegie Mellon Library!

October 27, Wednesday
Capulin Volcano, NM
Drove a “Bob road” - all day. The first stop was Capulin Volcano; we hiked the rim and all the way down into the volcano, had lunch at a country store, and then on to Oklahoma. We made the high point in Oklahoma, which is the Black Mesa, named for the volcanoes found there. It was a 4.6-mile hike each way; that wasn’t the challenge, the challenge was we were losing daylight. We arrived just before 3 p.m., so we put a wiggle on and started out. The climb is under 1,000 feet, but then there is another mile + across the mesa at the top, one of the largest mesas in the world, to the monument. We did it and were back to see a full moon just rising by 6 p.m. - 9.2 miles in 3 hours, whew! Since it gets dark early in the canyon, we hightailed it to the Black Mesa State Park Campground - a beautiful campground, plug-in’s, cement pads, it was just that it was very dark and sort of winding through cattle country, but we arrived safe and sound.

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Photos

Carneige Library Raton NM
Being from Pittsburgh we know the Libraries that he built but did not know about this one

Hot Pepper
You would see this all over