Drive to Silver City, New Mexico

We left the Carlsbad KOA pretty early today, hoping to get a good start before those blasted (no pun intended) desert winds roared up again.  We were heading to Silver City, New Mexico and instead of taking a more direct route through El Paso, Texas we opted for a more scenic drive through the Lincoln National Forest as shown below.  You can click on this map to pull up a bigger image.

As we drove out of the flat desert mesa surrounding the Carlsbad area and entered the mountainous Lincoln National Forest, the scenery become more and more beautiful.  Rolling hills and greenery!  Pine trees, creeks, and Swiss-styled architecture.  The climb up to Cloudcroft was lovely and the descent down to Alamogordo was also beautiful, even if I did have to drop a gear and keep our speed down: we did not want to gain any first-hand knowledge of using a runaway truck ramp! Click here for some photos.  By the way, the Cloudcroft area looked like a great place to camp  in the summer and/or visit in the winter for skiing, etc. 

Although we did not originally plan to visit White Sands National Monument, we decided to pop in for a quick visit - our route took us right past the entrance and it seemed silly not to go take a look.  Click here for some photos.  White Sands is impressive, although I'm not sure I would choose it as a picnic destination.  Just driving around the dunes for 20 minutes made my eyes sore even with sunglasses on... bright white!

Once we hit Las Cruces, the drive as far as Deming was much less pleasant - the wind was gusting with a vengeance and the scenery was once again scrubby desert.  The wind was so bad that we passed several truck pull-offs where tractor trailer rigs and RVs were hunkered down.  But, as I told Lynda, no point in stopping unless we're willing to sit until evening. So, we continued on at around 50MPH with me white-knuckling the steering wheel.  Thankfully, conditions were much improved after turning north at Deming for the final leg to Silver City.

So we are staying at the KOA in Silver City for the night and plan on visiting the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in the morning. This is about an 90 minute drive from here but we could not find a campground any closer that can accommodate a motor home.