We have been away every weekend since memorial day, I mentioned the Villanueva trip on memorial weekend, the weekend after we left Santa Fe on friday night and headed for Elephant Butte Lake, like heading to Taupo really, large lake in the middle of the state. Lots of people were there camping and preparing for fishing/waterskiing type activities.
We drove in about 8.30pm and left early next morning - it was hot here and exposed. We were heading west to Gila National Monument, it was about another two or three hours drive from here. It's an old mining area and there are little towns which still have one or two shops operating, thou mostly as cafes now.
The National Monument is within a National forest so there's heaps of camping around about. The monument is based on some cliff dwellings from the Mogollon culture. Naturally we completed the Junior ranger program, but this place is different, they have a junior, junior ranger program, so Madeline did that and got a badge too.
The campground was nice and there was a fifteen minute walk to another cliff dwelling just behind it so we did that in the morning after we'd packed up. We had quite a drive to get home but we broke it up with a stop at a campground which Liam was able to find some bouldering to do so the kids got a good leg stretch after several hours in the car and with several more to come. We drove through the very large array and took some pictures and read the signs but didn't go to the visitor centre. We stopped in Socorro and got chocolate and ice creams, for some time Madeline had been asking for chocolate but otherwise was bored and pretty well behaved. Liam was asleep. Our trip was something like this.
Last weekend we camped much closer to home in the Hyde State Park about 20min drive towards the ski basin from Santa Fe. We went with friends from school and so had a collection of kids who played in the river near where we camped they built a dam (naturally) and floated various things from the bridge upstream down to the dam. We walked up to a waterfall nearby which was pretty and had water in it which is not always the case in these parts. In the evening we had a spectacular thunder and hail storm, but the state parks in NM have these really nice shelters so we were able to watch and stay dry.
We'd noticed a blocked inlet and an outlet pipe into the area we'd put our tents up and in the morning when I found a map we discovered we'd camped in the ice skating pond!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment