Gila Cliff Dwellings

Railroad Trestle near Cloudcroft

Cloudcroft. Leaving Santa Fe, I headed toward Cloudcroft (clearing in the clouds) via Kline's Corner. I didn't stay there as it seemed basically a small and cabin community. I did see the railroad trestle on the right. The trestle (over Mexican Canyon) is a branch line (the Alamagordo-Sacramento Mountain Railway) of the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad, which built it to provide a steady supply of timber necessary to continue construction of the railroad line. The Cloud-Climbing Railroad became famous as the railroad with spectacular vistas along the way to its destination " in the clouds." I saw a deer as I continued driving across southern New Mexico's vast expanses to spend the night in Socorro.

General Store at Winston

Gila Cliff Dwellings. Taking a blacktop road (May 22, Wednesday) off I25 to Winston, I had a hotdog at the general store there. I thought I would not find much in the way of food or gas for quite some time. Some local ranchers/hunters were chatting with each other and with the woman acting as clerk, like one might expect in small towns. Part of the conversation consisted of her telling how an woman had helped her elderly husband by giving him a teaspoon of coconut oil each day. It becomes solid and has the appearance of lard when stored in the refrigerator but really helps the mind. After his first teaspoon full, he could draw a clock and locate some of the numbers on it. Maybe, this falls into the area of home remedies. Road 52 became 59 before it turned into an unimproved one which eventually led (142, 28, 159) to highway 180 which took me to Glenwood and eventually to Silver City. In this trip, I almost hit a startled deer, as it darted sharply across the road. I saw another along the way.

Gila River. Thursday, May 24, I saw the dwellings, starting with a field house at the Lower Scorpion Campground's "Trail to the Past" at the same elevation as the Visitor's Center. I had seen five deer on the way to the center. They definitely weren't afraid of people. A well-visited hummingbird feeder was an interesting feature of the visitor's center. Up a steep  trail on the mountain side are the ruins of interlinked cave dwellings build in five cliff alcoves by the Mogollon peoples. People of the Mogollon culture lived in these cliff swellings from between 1275 and 1300 AD. A very small lizard peeked out from beneath a rock step on the return trail, which was in full sun in contrast to the trail up. Much of the area was burned in the Miller (2011) Fire, named after the people whose unextinguished campfire started the conflagration. Beginning in the mountains, the three forks of the Gila River converge in this valley and ultimately flow toward the Colorado River. For as long as 10,000 years, this resource-rich floodplain acted as a travel corridor, drawing people into and out of the valley. The ancestral people of the Mogollon (pronounced mo-go-yón) region, Chiricahua Apache, spanish, and Mexican, and Anglo explorers and settlers relied upon this river for transportation. After viewing the cliff dwellings, I took unimproved and high-clearance vehicle only recommended road 150 north (up North Star Canyon), which runs between the Aldo Leopold and Gila Wilderness Areas.

Areas for Grinding Corn

Wilderness Areas. The Black Range, stretching 100 miles north to south and the state's largest mountain range, lies within the Aldo Leopold wilderness. Unlike the Gila Wilderness with its winding, flat canyon bottoms, rolling uplands, and grassy parks, the Aldo Leopold Wilderness safeguards its mountains with steep slopes, narrow canyons, and difficult access. Its ecosystems include Chihuahuan Desert scrub and grassland, piñon-juniper ponderosa pine, and spruce-fir. I continued on through Winston, spending the night at Truth or Consequences. The Gila Wilderness was the first area anywhere in the world set aside solely to protect its character as wildness.

Chimney at Inn on the Alameda in Santa Fe

Creek Crosses Unimproved Road