February 20, 2024
On February 2 we left South Llano River State Park and headed west on I-10 right into a strong headwind. We stopped at an RV park in Fort Stockton, Texas. It was very windy there also. While there I got on the web site for Guadeloupe Mts National Park where we were scheduled to go next. There was a severe wind warning for sustained winds of 45 mph and gusts to 90 mph and the wind chill was predicted to be 8 degrees. We decided that it might be better to forget this stop. We were lucky to be able to get reservations at Davis Mt State Park farther west and a bit south of I-10 in Texas in what is known as the Sky Island area of Texas.
We stayed at Davis Mt SP for 3 nights. We have stayed here before and knew that it was a very nice park. Our first day there was very windy and chilly, but certainly nothing as bad as 45 mph winds. We took advantage of several programs at the Interpretive center. One was on bird watching, another on the geology of the area and the final program we went to was on native inhabitants. We also saw a very nice movie on the Civilian Conservation Corps whose projects we have seen in parks all over the country. We also spent a lot of time birding and our best find here was Montezuma Quails. The park has one of the fanciest bird feeding stations that we have ever seen and lots of very nice hiking trails. We enjoyed driving along the Skyline Drive in the park that went up to the highest point in the park and had great views.
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| View from Skyline Drive |
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| Montezuma Quail |
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| View from the top of Davis Mt |
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| Hiking the Old CCC Trail |
While there we also visited the very interesting Fort Davis National Historic Site. The fort was in operation from 1854 - 1891 and protected travelers on the San Antonio - El Paso road as well as protecting the area from marauding Indians. We visited the museum, saw a movie on the history of the fort and toured the restored buildings. It is a very interesting place.
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| Offices Quarters |
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| Fort Davis |
On February 6, we headed west and north, crossed into New Mexico and spent the night at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park . It is on the slope of the Sacramento Mts and overlooks the Chihuan Desert.
The next day, we drove the 35 minutes to White Sands National Park. First, we stopped at the Visitor’s Center and watched the movie and walked through the museum. The dunes cover 275 square miles, the largest gypsum dune field in the world. We took the 16 mile Round trip Dunes Drive and took the Interdunes Boardwalk and the Dune Life Nature Trail. The dunes are so white, spectacular and otherworldly!
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As we were leaving the parking lot of the Dune Life Nature Trail, we noticed a very bad sounding noise coming from the trailer passenger side tire. We very slowly drove back the 2 miles to the visitor center. Mark took the tire off and discovered that the bearings were totally gone and it was a big possibility that the trailer axel was compromised also. We spent the next couple of hours finding a garage that would fix it and a tow company with a flat bed trailer to take us back the 20 miles to Alamogordo, N.M.
The folks at Neudorf’s Enterprises were very nice. They let us stay in our trailer in their parking lot and even hooked us up to electricity. The place was right on a major highway and the semi trucks went by all night and trains roared by on the nearby railroad tracks. The next day they decided the axel was beyond repair and work began trying to find a replacement. This meant making many calls to Forest River Trailers in Indiana to get the right axel. It was ordered the next day (Friday) but was not shipped until Tuesday. It finally arrived in Alamogordo on Friday (the 16th).
We drove up to Cloudcroft, NM twice. It is a little mountain village at almost 9,000 ft that was established about 1899 with a railroad going up to the town to haul down wood for the lumber industry. It has a lovely old restored hotel which people from El Paso went to in the summer to escape the heat, a restored railroad trestle, a cute main street and a delicious barbecue place : Mad Jack’s Mountaintop Barbecue. It was delicious! They marinate the meat overnight, open at 11am and serve until they run out. We were told to get there early. I guess they run out a lot.
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Twice we went to the cute little Alameda Park Zoo. It was established in the 1890’s for the train passengers in Alamogordo to pass the time while they waited for the train tp Cloudcroft. We visited the Tularosa Basin Museum of History and learned lots of information about the area from native American times to the present. One neat thing that they had was a bunch of short films about the history of different things in the area that local high school students made for a film class.
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| Marmoset |
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| Fastest Tortoise we have ever seen |
Another day, we drove a little ways north to the BLM’s Three River Petroglyph Site.
The site contains over 21,000 petroglyphs ( rock carvings) which are outstanding examples of Jornado Mogollon rock art (1,000 years old). Archeologists have no idea what the carvings mean. We walked the 1 mile round trip trail up the hill to all the rocks and saw many of the carvings. It was very interesting! The snow covered mountains in the distance were also very beautiful.
A very interesting museum in Alamogordo was the New Mexico Museum of Space History. It covered the history of space exploration from the study of the stars by ancient people to current spacecrafts. It was a beautiful glass building on a hill on the outskirts of Alamogordo. You started your tour of the museum on the top floor of the building and worked your way down. There were lots of interactive exhibits. We also went to a planetarium show about the night sky and a large screen movie about how astronauts train underwater to learn how to work in space. I think the museum is in Alamogordo because nearby White Sands Missile Range had a lot to do with the beginnings of rocketry.
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| Landing the Space Shuttle ... Nailed It! |
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| Museum Elevator |
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| New Mexico Museum of Space History |
I would be amiss to not mention the pistachio farms and wineries in the area. There are 2 of them. Heart of the Desert Pistachios and Wines was the classiest. We tasted specialty olive oils and vinegar, lots of pistachios, homemade candy and 11 types of their wine (free tastings). We especially liked the pistachio rose wine. The second place was Mc Ginn’s PistachioLand. It advertises itself as the home of the world’s largest pistachio! It is more touristy than the other place. We did take a tram tour through the grape and pistachio fields and learned all about the pistachio industry which was very interesting. We also enjoyed their homemade pistachio ice-cream .
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| World's largest pistachio |
I think that we probably saw more of the area than many of the locals have, but after 9 days of an unexpected stay, we were getting rather antsy. So when the axel finally arrived on Friday about 11:30 am and the technician removed the old axel and installed the new one, we left Alamogordo at 1:45 and drove over 7 hours to our next stop stop, Patagonia Lake State Park in Arizona. It is so quiet and beautiful after 9 nights in a parking lot.
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| New Axle Going On |
But this a good place to start next time.
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