Month: March 2024

I wanted to give an update on our travels since leaving Silver City: Alan and I have discovered a new-to-us beautiful spot here in southern Arizona/New Mexico. It’s such a pleasure to find a place that both grabs your imagination and offers endless fun, relaxation and hiking, and the Chiricahuas have done that and more.

This area, Cave Creek Basin, is a cross between Zion National Park and the San Juan Mountains: 2000′ red rock cliffs beneath snow-capped peaks.

We’ve done several long hikes , and there are many more to discover, something that always gets me excited for future ventures.

We’re camped in the high P-J desert: an area of the National Forest that has sadly been heavily over-grazed. Our site has lots of old cow poop around, but nothing recent, and is very private. We like to find spots where the dogs can run free. Not that Clair and Zane wander, but they do like to check out the surroundings and keep an eye out for critters.

We drove 2 hours across 20 miles of the mountain range on a fantastic, but very rough mountain road to visit the Chiricahua National Monument. It was worth the shaking and bouncing to see the Wonderland of Rocks, although they have the usual rules about no dogs on trails, which cut our visit short. On our way back, we stopped at Rustler Park, a (still closed for winter) campground at 9000′, snowy and badly impacted by the 2011 Horseshoe II Fire.

Back at our camp, we checked out a couple of trails more friendly to Clair and Zane. This is a birder’s paradise, and birds are very present. Most of the people who visit in the springtime are serious about it, but it has not been crowded. We’ve seen a few Ring-Tail Cats, which are cool looking critters, although I imagine if you live here, they might be as troublesome as raccoons are in other areas.

We will be leaving here soon, and our next stop is back in the Silver City area, where we are hoping it has warmed up a bit. We’d like to wander into the Gila Wilderness, but it was still too cold and snowy when we left there a week ago. Fingers crossed.

We wish you a Happy Spring Equinox and the return of GREEN!

Alan and I have been traveling now for about 3 weeks, and are completely immersed in the camping life. It always takes a week or so to settle in, get Pippin set up, and the dogs used to the rules of the road. This year was complicated by bad weather, cold, and high winds that made it challenging to get the water system up and running, not to mention nail-biting driving conditions.

We had a couple of lovely days in Durango, (thanks to the Greens for a lovely birthday!) followed by a quick trip to Canyon de Chelly, where we were met by 50 mph wind gusts, frozen pipes in the campground, and innumerable goatheads and rez dogs. Clair and Zane refused to walk anywhere but down the middle of the campground road, and wanted to be on leash at all times. They are terrified of the goatheads, not the loose dogs!

From there, we headed further south, stopping for a marvelous afternoon in the Petrified Forest National Park, where we took a fascinating hike, albeit in high winds.

Those winds and freezing nights forced us to book a site at a spendy KOA campground, something we don’t usually enjoy, but we needed available reliable water and a sheltered spot to finally organize Pippin, so we were thankful to find it in Holbrook, AZ. From there, we continued south and finally escaped the wind, dropping off the Mogollon Rim into the Tonto Basin, a place we have been visiting for 7 years now. There, it was calm and 70 degrees and we were finally able to relax and pursue our favorite activity: hiking.

After a week of that, Alan and I decided to wander a bit. We had been staying at the Cholla Campgound, and it was beginning to fill up, so it was time to go. We drove east, back into New Mexico, stopping overnight at a remote place called The Black Hills Rockhound Area. It was certainly full of rocks. There we met a12 year-old rockhound, avidly outfitted with cleaning materials for his finds, a canvas rock-collecting-bag, and a homemade walking stick jury-rigged from a broken ski pole taped to a crowbar for easy digging. He was very knowledgeable, talkative, and turned what looked to us like a field of sharp lava rocks into “river diamonds”, “imperial jasper”, “jas-agate”, and “rose quartz”.

The next day, we passed through one of our favorite towns, Silver City, where we stocked up on groceries and propane. Silver City is the only place in the U.S. whose downtown tourist area is anchored by a 50+ year-old food co-op, still looking just like the original hippie establishment. It also has the best coffee shop for many hindreds of miles, TranquilBuzz, which we of course visited before heading out to The City of Rocks State Park. The campsite I had reserved out there was unfortunately too tight even for Pippin, so we cancelled that and headed out to BLM land nearby. We’ve been here ever since.

The City of Rocks is a very strange geological phenomenon, indeed, worthy of a state park out in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert Grasslands of southern New Mexico. It is a few hundred acres of odd rock shapes, all jumbled together. The park has created campsites spread through these odd shapes, and it is fun to walk through them. There’s a steep but stunning hike up nearby Table Mountain (in the far left distance), from which you can see down into Mexico. Being booked out 6 months in advance, however, makes The City of Rocks hard to get a site. The one I had reserved months ago didn’t say we wouldn’t fit. As it turned out, we much prefer our boondock site a few miles away, where dogs can run free!

Since being here, we have hiked, slept, read, written, thrown endless balls for dogs and even soaked in nearby Faywood Hot Springs. Lovely! We highly recommend checking out Rockhound State Park, Spring Canyon State Park, the Gila National Forest and just wandering around on the BLM land for entertainment.

Happy Pi Day