Gila National Forest

Growing up in Idaho, I spent a good percentage of my time in the mountains. I love mountains. I have to be near mountains, or at least be able to see them in the distance. (One of the reasons I have no desire to live in the Midwest). To me there's not too many things better than being among the pines and aspens of a Western mountain range. While there are mountains very near to Las Cruces, they are barren of much vegetation, and since they simply jut out of the desert, there's not much recreation to be had in them, other than hiking. To remedy our longing for a pine forest, we made a trip to the Gila National Forest, which covers a good portion of Southwest New Mexico. It also offered us a chance to get a little dirt on our new Montero we had just purchased. To put it bluntly, we were not disappointed. This was some of the most beautiful country on God's great earth. I loved it, and only wished it were closer to Las Cruces. Before entering the forest boundary, we stopped in a ghost town named Chloride. While not a true ghost town, as a few people still live there, Chloride is but a remnant of its mining heyday. We ate lunch there, and the highlight was a visit to the Pioneer store Museum. The current owners of the museum bought the property back in the 1980s. The store had been closed down decades before, but everything left inside, including boxes of records from the town of Chloride. So, when the new owners bought the building, they also acquired everything inside. Following a restoration of the building, they used the items inside to recreate what the store would have looked like, and made themselves a quaint little museum out of it. As a historian, this is an absolute dream! It's like opening a time capsule. They are still in the process of going through all the town documents and cataloging them, as well as getting them ready to put on exhibit. For some reason I didn't take any pictures inside the museum. Perhaps one day we will return to Chloride and snap some pics.

We then worked our way through the mountains to the town of Reserve, where we spent the night at the Rode Inn Motel. It was a decent little motel, and was better than the Super 8 we stayed at in Chandler, AZ. We ate dinner at Ella's Cafe, and I had some very tasty, yet spicy, green chile enchiladas. The next morning we headed out of Reserve, and had hoped to find our way on forest roads to the other side of the Gila. However we could not find the road we wanted, so we turned around and headed back to Reserve, and took the highway to Silver City. Along the way we stopped at the Catwalk National Trail, a steel (catwalk, hence the name) trail suspended above a small creek. Pretty cool little place.


We then took the windiest road I have ever been on through the mountains from Silver City to Hillsboro. It was a beautiful, yet nauseauting drive. Lilly got sick and Marie and I didn't feel too good either. I will not drive that road again, at least not with a 22 month old child. Finally we reached the flat desert between Hillsboro and Hatch, and headed out to I-25 and back to Las Cruces.
The Gila also seems to be a great place to see wildlife. We saw antelope, roadrunners, and turkeys, among others. Had it not been hunting season there is a good chance we would have seen some deer and elk as well.