Back in New Mexico

The title of this blog is "Exploring the West." For the last few years, though, it's been more like "Exploring the Mid-West/Mid-South." Now we can get back to exploring the west. Last month I started a job as a Digital Projects Librarian at New Mexico State University. So, here we are back in Las Cruces. We lived here for two years while I was a student at NMSU and we're excited to be back, and to be close to mountains once again. While I've been busy with my new job, we have had several opportunities to get out and enjoy the outdoors here. One Saturday morning we hiked at Soledad Canyon, which is just at the base of the Organ Mountains, only a few miles from Las Cruces. It was a fun little hike, but my shoulders and back were killing me from packing Carter around.
Then on Labor Day we headed up to Cloudcroft. This is one of our favorite areas in Southern New Mexico, as an elevation gain of over 4,000 feet in a matter of less than 20 miles takes one off the desert floor and into the mountains. This typically means the temperatures are around 20 degrees cooler as well. The weather was beautiful when we first got up there. We stopped and looked at the Mexican Canyon Trestle from an overlook just off the highway. The trestle was part of a railroad that went from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft.
We then drove up to Bluff Springs, an area where we had been several times, but only in the winter. It was nice to see it in the summer, although there were a ton of people camped there. Not my idea of an ideal place to camp, as it is right off the road, but whatever.
After that we headed back to the trestle and ate lunch and then decided to hike down to the trestle (you can see the platform on the picture above). There were some ominous clouds and we heard several rumbles of thunder, but we decided to take a chance because it appeared to be skirting us. As you can well imagine, that turned out to be wrong. It was a fun hike, and it sprinkled a bit on the way down. It was coming back up when things got really fun. It started raining fairly hard, and of course I was packing Carter on my back, so he was getting soaked, as were the rest of us. You would think that growing up in the mountains would have taught me better. I admit, what we did was stupid. We were not prepared for heavy rain. I won't make that mistake again. We made it back to the replica depot which also serves as restrooms/visitor center and within maybe two minutes of getting under the shelter it really started to pour. It would have been horrible to hike in that without any rain gear. The kids made the best of it, even though Carter was shivering. But we got him in the car, threw a blanket over him and turned on the heater. Always an adventure.