Wherein It Rains In New Mexico

One quickly acclimates, and I certainly have to the extent that when it rained in Silver City on Saturday I found it to be both odd and refreshing.

Friday was a gorgeous sunny day and I spent most of it in my cousin's courtyard reading Caro's "The Passage of Power."  The first 200 pages, about LBJ's abortive run for the Presidency in 1960 and his Vice Presidency, were painfully slow (as I think they were in real life) and took me about two weeks to get through.  The next section, about Kennedy's assassination and Johnson's first two weeks as President, was 300 pages and I didn't want to put it down.  It is fun to see pictures of LBJ's living room at the ranch when I was just there a couple of weeks ago.  (Caro doesn't have any pictures of his bathroom - but I do.)

Saturday Cousin Sherry and I drove into the Gila National Forest to see the Gila Cliff Dwellings.  It was raining in Silver City and up through the mountains, so the scenery was softened by fog and it was very beautiful.  These pictures don't do it justice.

The National Monument (the cliff dwellings themselves) was established by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907.  They had been documented by an archeologist named Adolph Bandelier in the 1880's and when he arrived had already been looted which makes determining the history even more difficult.  In the early 20th century, an ecologist/forester in the region, Aldo Leopold, encouraged the Forest Service to designated the Gila Wilderness in 1924 - the first designated wilderness area in the U.S.

Running through the forest is the Gila River.  This is the longest undammed stretch of river in the continental U.S.  Having seen the sand box which comprises the Rio Grande, it was nice to see actual running water.  The Gila River itself is quite impressive but I don't have a picture.  Here is a picture of the much smaller West Fork of the Gila, which you walk over to get to the cliff dwellings.

The rain that had been falling for the previous twelve hours contributed to the stream; normally my cousin says there is not as much water in this branch.

The cliff dwellings themselves are something of a mystery.  They are natural caves that were then modified and used by the Mogollon people from about 550 to 1300.  At that point, they were abandoned and no one seems to be quite sure why.  After a hundred years or so, the Apaches moved into the region but didn't appear to live in the cliffs.

It's a fascinating place to walk through - and conveniently enough, the rain let up while we were there.  The holes in the cliffs that look like eyes are a couple of the cliff dwellings, as seen from the path that you walk to reach them.

Here are what some of the caverns looked like.  You can see that there was considerable adobe work to build walls in some of the larger caverns.

 

 



The corncobs in this last picture apparently date back hundreds of years.

The National Park Service has some good pictures here.  It's hard to get good shots in some of the caverns with a camera phone so if you're interested in seeing more that's a good resource.  (Of course, a better plan is for you to visit here yourself - I highly recommend it.)

We went to a fun place for dinner Saturday night in Pinos Altos, a few minutes north of Silver City:  the Buckhorn Saloon and Opera House.  To call the outside of the building "nondescript" is to overstate its grandeur.  The inside, though, is really impressive.  Quite large and very Old West.  And the food was great, too.

The top picture is one of the rooms in the restaurant.  The bottom picture is of the Opera House (which is right next door); they were having a fundraiser for the Aldo Leopold School - sort of funny since I had just seen his name that morning in the Gila Forest.

Monday my aunt, cousin and I are headed northeast to Omaha.  On the way we plan to stop in Tucumcari, NM, which is apparently an old Route 66 stop with some interesting things to see.  It's a long way from here to Omaha (about 17 hours from the town north of Las Cruces where we'll pick up Aunt Susie) and we're planning to break it into three days so we can be a bit more leisurely.  Please think good thoughts about weather for us!