Pre-Thanksgiving Driveabout

Greetings fan(s) and friends, I'm just back to my generous mother's basement following my latest #VanLife experiment in which I traveled and camped around New Mexico and a tiny sliver of Texas for the last 10 days/nine nights.

Executive Summary:

Sat 11/10: Leave Denver about 9:30 am, south on 285 past the sand dunes to Alamosa, then south of there almost to NM border.  Take right on 17 in Conejos and travel up beautiful valley (Conejos River) I've never been in  before to two passes about 10.5 - 11k feet as the sun was just sidling over to the western sky.  It was beautiful but I was anxious to loose a bunch of altitude before finding a campsite because I'd been checking weather predictions for the coming nights in the entire area between Denver and Mexico and I knew some cold nights were coming.  So I continued down to Chama (the first town you come to in New Mexico on 17) which was great.  It had gas for $2.55 (at least $0.10 cheaper than it was in Denver that morning, and this was at 8,000 feet in the middle of nowhere!) and an information center which I didn't utilize.  I proceeded south on 64 to the turn off to the west just after Los Ojos on 112.  The road turns to gravel at the El Vado Reservoir dam and if you go another 5-6 miles you get to a piece of the Carson National Forest and if you go just past the entrance sign and make the first right you come to a lovely camping spot.  This was the only place I built a fire and it was because someone left some wood there.  Every other night I finished dinner and cleaning up and jumped in the back of the van and got in my sleeping bag and watched Netflix (previously downloaded!  Someone was thinking ahead!)

from the El Vado Reservoir Dam

First Campsite

Sun 11/11: Water bottles froze overnight inside the van.  Not a hard freeze, though I had prepared for that by leaving 9.1% of each container empty.  I made coffee and packed up and headed south through Regina to Cuba where I headed east on 126 toward Valles Caldera.  As this sometimes-dirt road wound up and down and around I passed through regions with old snow still on the north sides of the hills.  I think it was starting a new snowstorm in Denver that day.  This is the region of NM I'm most interested in because a) it's close to Denver and also to the desert to the south and west and b) it's beautiful and c) hopefully it stays wet or at least damp during climate change and d) it's pretty high up so it's not baking hot in the summer.  But I didn't want to linger there this time because I knew the cold weather was following me south so I wanted to get as far south and descend to the lowest altitude I could to try to find the warmest weather possible.  I thought the best bet would be to follow the Rio Grande south so I did and eventually veered off I-25 onto Highway 1 to the west of the interstate south of Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge and took FR (Forest Road, I believe) 225 (it was incorrectly labeled 255 in my DeLorme New Mexico Atlas & Gazateer) just into the Cibola National Forest similar to the evening before and found this sweet spot to park.  The next morning I wandered up a nearby hill to the east and took these pictures:

Don't overlook Vanessa in the left center!

Mon 11/12 Now it was Monday morning, and that night was supposed to be the coldest yet anywhere I'd looked before I left, with lows in the high 20s at best and the teens at worst.  So I continued down the Rio Grande sightseeing a little in Truth Or Consequences and Las Cruces (where I got some nice tacos al carbon which I could only eat half of so I saved the rest for dinner) then down to the visitor center in Texas on I-10 and filled up with some more cheap gas (thanks GasBuddy.com!) and then traversed the mountains north of El Paso and continued east on 62-180 past Guadalupe Peak (at 8749 ft the highest point in Texas) and into a snowstorm past Pine Springs where I descended to the oil and gas plains of Eastern NM/West Texas, and eventually found a place to park for the night at a fishing access point 2 miles east of 285 just north of the state border on the Pecos River (the top end of Red Bluff Lake, which is obviously a reservoir).

Guadalupe Peak

The last mile on the way to the parking spot for the night.

Tue 11/13: I did not care much for this part of Texas, filled as it was with huge burning methane vent-stacks, oil wells, and roads crowded with tankers and scads of identical white industrial pickup trucks.  So I headed north to Carlsbad where I hoped to find a public library to access the internet and plan the remainder of my trip (I'd planned to return to Denver by the following Monday, 11/19).  This was the third time I'd tried to find a library and I'd been foiled at each attempt.  The first time was Albuquerque but it was closed on Sundays.  The second time it was Las Cruces but it was closed for Veterans Day (the previous day).  Today the Carlsbad public library was opened and offered internet access but it was currently down and they were working to repair it.  I could wait around if I wanted, but I didn't want to.  With the limited data access on my phone I already knew you were allowed to camp overnight at the Hackberry Lake OHV Area (about 30 miles NE of Carlsbad) so I headed there.

My first overnight spot with a picnic table and an outhouse!  Luxury!

Starting to get better organized in the back of Vanessa now, after having just thrown everything in with my best planning prior to departure but still, after 3 nights you figure out optimizations, like, you could have left 90% of this stuff behind and have more room since you only wear the same clothes every day anyway and only need one knife, fork, spoon, bowl, pan: not three of each, etc...

What do you think is in this bowl?  Hint: it's not the setting sun, though it sort of looks like that!  I'll let you think about it and I'll tell you later.

I'd had the place to myself until about sunset the night before when another car pulled up and parked at another picnic shelter.  We ignored each other until the next morning when I noticed the other car had some sort of antenna or mast (which later turned out to be a windsock, though you could hardly tell since it was perfectly still at dawn) erected which I hadn't noticed the night before, and doubted one could travel down the highway and through cities with.  So I bode my time until I saw the person emerge from their car to head to the outhouse and I wandered over while they were inside and when she (I now saw that it was a woman, though I had chauvinistically assumed it was a man) emerged I commented on the chilliness of the morning and glanced at her vehicle and was about to ask about her antenna when she said "it's a paramotor", which confused me because the tall pole didn't look like a motorized parasailing propeller but then I realized there was one of those strapped on to the  back of her car, too.  So I got to ask her all sorts of questions about that and watch her take off and fly around a while while I made my usual breakfast (at this point, since I'd been to the supermarket in Las Cruces) of bacon and eggs.

This looks like a pretty fun and simple sport!

Breakfast time.  Having a table sure is nice.

Wed 11/14: My next plan was to try to get to a public library in Artesia, which I eventually did, and gathered materials for my next couple nights which I planned to spend in or around the Guadalupe Mountains in the Lincoln National Forest.  You can drive into this range west of Carlsbad on 137 and it takes you eventually south to Dog Canyon on the state line, just north of Guadalupe National Park which I'd passed to the south of in Texas a couple nights before.  I saw there were several camping possibilities in the Lincoln National Forest or (maybe better due to lower elevation?) in the BLM land just west of there.  It was a beautiful drive and I ended up here:

On the way down to the valley floor, heading south on 137.

Eventual camping spot.  You can see the cliffs I'll be driving northward on top of the following day to the left of center in the photo.

The next morning.  The day's rim road destination, FR 67, just to the right of Vanessa.

Thur 11/15: After packing up I backtracked a bit and took FR 67 north from 137 along the rim of the mountains and through the national forest.  It was a great view and really nice knowing I could just camp anywhere I wanted to pull over.  Which was eventually here.

Up on top of the cliffs on the Rim Road now.

Behind me you can see the valley I'd camped in the night before between here and the Sacramento/Brokeoff Mountains the night before.  I think I figured out the most pyramidal-shaped peak on the horizon is Wind Mountain.

With and without.

My typical view while reclining in the back of Vanessa.

Sacramento Mountains to the west at first light the next morning.

Fri 11/16: I followed various gravel and eventually paved roads northwest through Pinon and into another region of the Lincoln National Forest past Weed to Cloudcroft, stopping at Sunspot and Apache Point solar observatories to reconnoiter and get a view of the valley to the west, which contains Alamogordo and White Sands, which you can see in the picture below.  After a burrito in Cloudcroft, and using the detailed Forest Service map I'd picked up at the Sunspot Visitor Center I found a nice camping spot in the hills above Alamogordo/La Luz which fooled me the first time I passed by looking for it because there's a sign indicating a runaway truck ramp and no parking allowed but you have to drive past all that to get to a closed (but not locked!) gate you can go through (closing the gate behind you at request of the sign on the gate) to find a nice camp site overlooking the valley.

View of the valley from Sunspot south of Cloudcroft.

Camping spot, this time looking east toward a further north section of the Sacramento mountains than where I'd started the day.

In the valley is 82 heading up from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft (looking east).  I had been on that highway (twice!) looking for the exit to the forest road which eventually led me up here, though it was a pretty dicey rutted dirt road for a Honda Odyssey (with only 4.5" clearance), which nevertheless did great for aways.

Eventually I came to the hill on the left of this photo (which was heavily rutted and had several large rocks and was quite steep) and I decided to leave well enough alone so I backed into a wide spot across the road for the night.

But I hiked the rest of the way up the road to the highest point I could reach for the sunset and got some nice pictures there.

Sat 11/17:  Two nights to go, planning my return to Denver, with news of another cold and stormy patch of weather moving in I decided to return to the Rio Grande valley and, having read online that the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge (just north of the Bosque Del Apache NWR where I'd previously found "no camping" signs on the way down) would allow you to park outside the gates and hike on the grounds during their non-open hours which were from 8-4:30 M-Sat, and rationalizing that sleeping in your vehicle is a kind of horizontal hiking on the grounds, I figured I'd scope that place out and maybe sleep there.  As it turns out I got there about 3:00 so they were still open for an hour and a half (and closed the next day, mwaaa ha ha ha!) but in talking with the ranger I learned that there was another place associated with the Wildlife Refuge, comprising some of the southern border of it, which had BLM land just to the south of that.  And it was called San Lorenzo Canyon and it was a few miles up a sandy wash which you were advised to have 4WD and high clearance for but I decided to check it out anyway and it turned out to be the least difficult of the non-paved roads I took on that trip, and at the end of it I found a delightful canyon with a copse of cottonwoods (my first) to park in, as you see below:

I wasn't completely alone here, but everyone was separated by a comfortable distance.  The car retreating in the photo above, which I'm glad is there to lend some scale, had driven up to the end of the canyon (the driveable portion ended in a box-like sandstone enclosure, though you could clamber up and over the obstruction and encounter another "upper canyon" delightful for hiking) and found someone else parked there, as had I, and come back down past me and was heading back out east past several other lovely spots but none as nice as mine, which was even nicer I thought, due to the trees, than the extreme driveable end of the canyon another quarter mile up.  Ultimately I was glad I got there as early as I did since I saw another couple cars farther down the canyon on my way out the next day than I'd seen on my way in.  It was Saturday night, though, so probably less busy during the week.

I had a fun photo session there that evening.

The next morning I woke up and wanted to go up past the other people who were parked at the head of the driveable canyon and see the upper, hikeable canyon.  This required, according to the flyer I'd picked up at the Wildlife Refuge the afternoon before, "going over or around the cliff at the end of the canyon".  As I approached the end of the canyon I saw a pickup parked and I remembered a dog in the cab as they drove by the evening before and they had a tent set up and a generator going and some tunes playing and I saw a woman's head moving around behind the truck so I didn't want to intrude on them and I started trying to hike the "around" option I remembered from the flyer.  This turned out to be an excellent reminder of the inviolable aspect of scale to me, as this hike constantly turned into something 10 times bigger than I expected every time I stopped to assess my progress and remaining obstacles.  In this picture I had come from the right, a tributary channel of the main channel I was parked in, and was heading to the left, up the tributary to where I thought the tributary would soon rejoin or end and allow an easy passage back into the main channel.  Which is behind this rock.

This is the rock between me and my desired goal.  I thought about going up here but while I figured I had at least a 90% chance of making it up okay (due to a combination of nice secure rough sandstone with a thin layer of grit and pebbles in certain patches) I wasn't sure I had a good chance of getting back down again without injuring myself, so after a little probing I decided to move on.

This is looking across at the opposite wall of the canyon.  You can see the bottom is still moist here.  I began to get a little freaked out about mountain lions since I'd seen some posters about them in some of the visitor's centers I'd been in and I didn't like the idea of walking by myself on this cool morning into a watering hole.  I thought I'd be more comfortable up on the rocks behind me so I kept trying to scramble up onto the ridge rather than walk up the stream bed which would have been pretty easy at this point.

Eventually I came to a sub-ridge where the stream turned a corner and I was able to scramble up the line you see here to the right and get on the ridge in that way.

When I finally made it to the top of the ridge and had continued on past a few false smmits, looking back the way I'd come (I'd come up on the right here, and to the left is the 'upper canyon' I'd thought I'd be dropping down into, but now not so much) I could see the copse of cottonwoods (3/4 of the way up from the bottom of the picture, just in the middle from L to R, at the far side of the sandy stream bed) where Vanessa was parked.  I remember I could actually see the shining silver of Vanessa from here but you'd probably have to zoom in on the picture to pick her out.  In the distance is the Rio Grande valley

This is looking the other direction (west) up through the upper canyon where I'd been attempting to get to.  But if you can sense the height from which this picture is taken, and realize that I'd started in the lower canyon below this one, you know how high I'd come so far on this hike.  So I abandoned my plan to hike in that canyon and instead continued along the ridge toward some newly revealed higher-yet summits.

Looking east toward Vanessa on the left side of the sandy stream bottom, in the cottonwood copse which is pretty small but can just be made out in the distance.  The upper canyon, on the left of the picture, flows down to the jumble of rocks which separate it from the lower canyon where I'm parked.

This is from the same vantage as the picture above but, not being a panorama, it's easier to see some details of the ridge I've been coming up and where I'd taken previous pictures from, and in this case you can see the lower part of the upper canyon on the left, then the rock wall which separates it from the lower canyon, then the lower canyon with the cottonwood copse shading Vanessa in the lower canyon on the way out toward the east.

The trick now was to find my way back down.  And since I'm too stubborn to retrace my steps I had to go off exploring to the south looking for that sandy side-streambed I'd originally been walking up, where I'd gotten afraid of cougars, which now no longer scared me so much because I was more scared of trying to go back down the rock and scree I'd come up to get here, but as it turned out I came to a giant cliff which blocked my progress that way and I ultimately had to go back up to the main ridge at the same point where I'd originally intersected it and go back down, gingerly, the same way I'd come up.  Yes, in retrospect I believe that there was only one way I could have gotten up and down that hike and I had been forced to take it in both directions.   I conclude this because I had to backtrack 3-4 times on my way down and if you know me at all you know that I don't like to backtrack unless it's absolutely necessary.

Before I had to backtrack, though, I had been walking down the sweet sandy stream bed to the south of the main canyon thinking about what I would do if attacked by a mountain lion.  I decided I would use my (now empty) water bottle and wedge that in its mouth as it lunged at me (some quick reflexes needed here) and get away with some scratches from its claws as it tried to get the plastic water bottle unstuck from its teeth while I threw rocks at it and looked for a stick to whack it with.  Lovely stream bed.  Too bad it was eventually interrupted by a sandstone cliff overhanging (dry) waterfall before continuing again 200 feet below.

Sun, 11/18: One more night planned on the road and I wanted to return to the Valles Caldera area which I'd come past on the way down on my second day.  Specifically I wanted to check out a forest road I'd noticed leading from the nearby flats up to the top portion of highway 4 which wasn't the paved and busy tourist and fisher-person-filled stretch running down through Jemez Springs.  So I turned east off 4 onto 290 just north of the Jemez Pueblo and headed toward Vallecitos and Ponderosa and was soon back in the Santa Fe National forest.  FR 269, my destination, was closed off with a locked gate and a sign "for restoration" but 290 turned into FR 10 and continued as a dirt road on up through the Vallecito Creek valley.  I had originally planned to camp down at lower elevation that night (due, again, to the warmth issue) but being in a valley it was all shady and gloomy and I wanted to make sure this road would take me all the way to connect with Hwy 4 at the top so I kept going up.  Eventually I came to some local high points and clear-cut areas where the forest service allows logging by permit and that left a more open feeling and room to watch the sunset and get hit the next morning by the sunrise so I stopped there.  It turned out to be a nice place, but cold overnight, dipping into the upper 20s according to the temperature app on my phone (and the ice in my water bottles)

Home sweet home! 

After breakfast the next morning I packed up one more time and headed north for another beautiful drive up 285 and back to Denver and that's all I have to say about that!

As usual, here is a link to the full set of pics...

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone,
Chris

PS: The answer to the quiz question about what's in the plastic bowl is not "an egg", though I think it looks like that, too.  It's actually grapefruit juice and vodka because I hadn't brought a cup.

PPS: Lessons learned on this trip include a) it's colder in New Mexico in November than I expected and b) by not planning in advance, and instead feeling your way along, you can find some unexpectedly wonderful and interesting places.  You just have to show up in the vicinity and take the time to stop at visitors' centers and pick up brochures and maps and talk to locals (including rangers) and you'll discover all sorts of spots you wouldn't have been aware of if you'd relied on road atlases and Google maps alone.  At the same time, it takes a combination of resources to navigate most effectively.  Sometimes the road atlas shows roads Google maps doesn't show no matter how far you zoom in and sometimes vice versa.  Often they have different labels for the same road and I found at least one instance where the road atlas was mislabeled, at least according to the forest service sign posted by the side of the road.  Preparing an offline version of Google maps in advance was key!