City of Rocks State Park was born some 33 million years ago from a volcanic eruption (I’m sensing a trend) 1,000 times more powerful than Mount St. Helen’s. Over time erosion has created the rock ‘city’ we see today. I had read up on the park last year, in hopes...
The mining town of Lake Valley was founded in 1878 after silver was discovered. Almost overnight, the small frontier town blossomed into a major settlement with a population of 4,000 people. Today, silver mining has played out and all that remains is a ghost town. BLM has restored the schoolhouse...
Fort Craig, established in 1854, was one of the largest and most important frontier forts in the West. Set in the rugged beauty of Socorro County, N.M., it was one of the eight forts situated along the primary north-south road in the Rio Grande Valley. Fort Craig played a crucial...
Bosque del Apache is Spanish for “woods of the Apache,” and is rooted in the time when the Spanish observed Apaches routinely camped in the riverside forest. Since then the name has come to mean one of the most spectacular National Wildlife Refuges in North America. Here, tens of thousands...
I was directed, by a pamphlet I picked up at the VLA, that there was a small ghoest town just 3.5 miles off route back to the Interstate and I wasn’t going to pass up such an easy target to sight-see and take some photographs. Kelly, misspelled when registered at...
The Very Large Array (VLA), one of the world’s premier astronomical radio observatories, consists of 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. Each antenna is 82 feet in diameter. The data from all 27 antennas is combined...
Three villages make up Acoma Pueblo: Sky City (Old Acoma), Acomita, and McCartys. The Acoma have continuously occupied the area for more than 800 years, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. Acoma tribal traditions estimate that they have lived in the village for...
The temperature in this cave never gets above 31 degrees. As rain and snow-melt seep into the cave the ice floor thickens… more and more each year. They estimate it to be over 20 feet thick, with the deepest ice being more than 3400 years old. The green tint is...
800 feet deep, Bandera Volcano rose up in volcanic fury some 10,000 years ago. It is one of the finest examples of an erupted volcano in the country, and also one of the most accessible. A fairly easy 3/4 mile hike climbs around and into the blown out portion of...
The term El Malpais (“the Badlands”) is used locally to refer to lava flows. I did not know this when I came to this Ntnl Monument. From the satellite view it is clear; a huge black smudge blankets the area south of Grants, NM. It’s volcanic features include a string...
