CABALLO RESERVOIR TO FT. BAYARD TO SILVER CITY, NM

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CABALLO RESERVOIR TO FT. BAYARD TO SILVER CITY, NM

Friday April 27, 2012 8:45 and it was 68 degrees and clear. Thankfully after rocking all night in the wind, it is clear and has stopped blowing this morning. Mileage at start was 24202.

Started up in elevation going due west this morning on highway 152 toward Silver City. Quickly climbed up into the Black Mountain Range. Real trees at last!! You don’t realize how much you miss them when you’re driving through miles and miles of desert with only shrubs, bushes or just grassland.

We drove through the interesting historical mining town of Hillsboro that had some really quaint buildings. It was founded in the 1870’s after gold and silver was discovered nearby. The town developed into an important mining and ranching center and was the county seat from 1884 to 1939. Valerie took a few pictures of some of the buildings.

Climbing higher, we stopped at a marker on Percha Creek that showed the span of the old road over the creek. Was a real engineering marvel in its day. Reached the summit of the range at 8,228 feet and stopped to look out at the view of the mountains and valleys below. Continuing on, we saw 3 mule deer does off to the side of the road. First deer we have seen in a while.

As we came through Emory Pass and down the other side of the mountain range, we saw many forest service campgrounds that looked like interesting places to camp, if, we had been looking for a place to spend the night. Further on, to our surprise, we came upon an absolutely HUGE open copper mine. An Apache showed a Spanish Lt. Colonel the copper deposit around 1799 and the Santa Rita Del Cobre Mine has been mined almost continuously since then. The US military began the building of nearby Fort Bayard to stop the raiding Apaches and to protect the mining in this area. Grant County has produced more gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc than the entire state of New Mexico combined. Most of the mines and the towns they spawned are gone now except, the open pit copper mines.

We drove into the town of Silver City and found the local Micky Ds. We wanted to find the phone number of an old family friend that we thought lived nearby, only to find that the number listed was disconnected. We always order something when we stop to use their wifi. This time, we ordered a side salad, two cookies, and a double hamburger all from the $1 menu, plus two senior drinks for 45 cents. For some reason, they gave us two double burgers with cheese and the rest of the stuff, so, we proceeded to eat lunch for about $4.00. Spotted a Wal-mart with a gas station in front, and got gas at $3.859 per gal, which is cheaper than we have seen elsewhere.

We drove a few miles to Fort Bayard and looked around. The Fort was built in 1866 and has a very long and interesting history. It was home to the 6^th US Cavalry and the Buffalo Soldiers. In 1899, a hospital was established for the use by the military as a sanatorium. It was this function, as a sanatorium, that we were most interested in. In 1922, the Veterans Administration built a new hospital to better care for its more than 1000 tubercular patients, one of which was our grandfather, William Tuvell who was there in the 1930’s. The 1930 census shows him as a patient, grandmother working as a nurse and living in the nurses’ quarters, and mother at age 8 as a border living with a fireman’s family. This was not a happy time for our mother and she spoke bitterly of living apart from her parents. The buildings of the fort are all still there although they are beginning to show their age and suffer from benign neglect . There is now community support to use the old hospital for a PTSD center with the Veterans Administration.

We drove up highway 180 to the Big Horn Campground outside of Glenwood, NM. It is located in the Mogollon Mountains that are part of the National Forest and therefore use of the campsite was free. Better ambience than a Wal-Mart lot. After we had been settled in for a bit, a Federal Fish and Game officer came by to warn us of a bear sighting in the campground the previous night. We told him we had driven to Alaska and were very familiar with the “bear drill.” Unfortunately, we didn’t see a bear or any other wildlife here, except for a large group of children and a few adults who spent the night in tents next to our site (despite the posted bear warnings).

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Comments

[Dale Gonzales]

Tnx 4 PIX!
Lived & hiked in area 12+yrs. Very homesick for isolated hikes & wonderful lack of "civilization".

[Dale Gonzales]

Tnx 4 PIX!
Lived & hiked in area 12+yrs. Very homesick for isolated hikes & wonderful lack of "civilization".