We planned this trip long in advance. The goal was to get to six national parks that we had not yet visited. They're all in the Southwest; the plan was to fly in and out of Albuquerque and drive from there. With the exception of Big Bend, most of these parks were relatively small and could be visited in one day. Therefore, we planned on two nights at hotels near each park's entrance station. Here's how it all came down.
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| Our plan, Counter-clockwise from Albuquerque |
White Sands NP, New Mexico
The easy three-hour drive from Albuquerque to Las Cruces (where we'd be staying) was anything but easy. Or three hours. Sure, there was a "wind advisory," but big deal, right? Well, let me tell you that when said winds exceed sixty miles per hour, it really is a big deal. And when there's a low-visibility warning on I25, it's a huge deal. Due to the blowing sand, we could not see more than 1/4 inch in front of us, and eventually had to stop. This haboob came out of nowhere and scared us half to death. We somehow eventually made it to Las Cruces, but I have no idea how.
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| On the way to Las Cruces in the middle of a haboob |
The next day, under sunny skies and relatively reasonable 20 mph winds, we made it to White Sands National Park. Because of the abundance of sand still on the road from the previous day's haboob, we were not able to drive more than three miles into the park.
Yet that was enough. Enough to get a good feel of the park. We hiked the Dune Life Nature Trail and the Playa Trail and although footing was difficult in the sand, the scenery was stunning. The white sands were blinding. The entire landscape was fantastical. As the park website says, it's like no place else on earth.
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| White Sands NP |
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| White Sands NP |
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| White Sands NP |
With the extra time we found ourselves with, we visited some historic sites close to Las Cruces, including the ruins of historic Fort Seldon, the Camino Real (a road from Mexico City to Santa Fe that runs through here, and the historic Mesilla area. We even got to a winery.
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| El Camino Real and nearby Fort Seldon |
Big Bend NP, Texas
Tired and rattled from the six-hour drive, we stumbled out of the car and onto the Santa Elena Canyon Trail. This was billed as the iconic trail hike of Big Bend National Park. The final hour had been through part of this humongous park, and the scenery was already gorgeous. But now, at the beginning of the hike, it was stupendous. The Rio Grande River here cuts through a narrow canyon with 1,500-foot sheer vertical cliffs. The trail took us along the U.S. side, starting at river level, up the side of the cliff some, and then back down, where you could walk across the water and touch the Mexico walls (we didn’t). It was only 1.8 miles, but we’ll remember it as one of our favorite all-time hikes.
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| Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP |
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| Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP |
The next morning, it was time for a longer hike: The Lost Mine Trail. Do not get confused and call it the Lost Mind Trail, although Lady Adventurer may think of it as such. It was 4.8 miles with 1,100 feet of elevation gain. Since the small parking area was filled up even before the sun rose, I had to drop Lady A. at the trailhead, drive back to the lodge to park, and then jog the 1.2 miles back up the mountain to meet her. The upward trail became more and more steep and difficult as we ascended. I thought the scenery was absolutely fantastic, but Lady A.’s knees, hips, and back may not agree. The scenery at the turnaround was a great payoff. Then it was back down the mountain, and back down even further for yours truly to fetch the car. I think it was a truly wonderful hike and even the now broken Lady A. would agree that, although it was arduous, it was beautiful all the way. Afterward, we medicated her with a few gallons of wine.
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| Lost Mine Trail, Big Bend NP |
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| Lost Mine Trail, Big Bend NP |
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| Lost Mine Trail, Big Bend NP |
Whilst at Big Bend, we stayed inside the park at the soon-to-be-rebuilt Chisos Mountains Lodge. It’s in a stunning location; a basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Our deck had a serene view of the not-too-distant mountains. We’ve stayed within some parks before, but not for a long time. It was all a unique experience for us.
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| Chisos Mountains Lodge, Big Bend NP |
Big Bend National Park is huge. It’s remote and very difficult to get to. Combine the best of Zion, Grand Canyon, and Death Valley, and you get Big Bend. I was surprised by the relatively large number of visitors until we figured out that Spring Break brings them out. Yet it’s well worth it. We didn’t even get to the Eastern side of the Park. I wish we could have spent more than a couple of days. It’s now one of our all-time favorites.
Having said all that, if you’re thinking of a visit, you may want to wait a couple of years. The Chisos Mountains Lodge and its surroundings will be demolished and rebuilt beginning in May 2025. Construction will take two years, and they say the entire basin will be inaccessible during this time. This is one of the major areas of the park, and it includes camping and access to several trails, including the Lost Mine Trail that we did.
Roswell and Rio Grande del Norte National Monument
The sun has risen, the sun has set. And we ain’t outta Texas yet. I thought of this little ditty during all the driving we did in the Lone Star State. (By the way, Lady Adventurer says that the star on their flag is the state’s rating.) The ditty was literally true when we drove across the entire state from East to West 48 years ago. This time, just driving around in the Western parts still amounted to a lot of miles. We were stopped by Border Control Inspection several times. They let us pass; I guess we were white enough. Some of the scenery was okay, but most was flat and scrubby. The final 100 or so miles from Fort Stockton to the NM border were all oilfields. The dust, litter, trucks, and pollution galore made this place look and smell exactly like Hell, or at least how I think of it.
It takes about 11 hours to go from Big Bend to Alamosa, Colorado, where we’d be staying for our visit to Great Sand Dunes. We broke that up by stopping overnight in Roswell, NM. Yes, that Roswell. While we were there, we visited the International UFO Museum and Research Center.
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| Roswell, NM |
As we continued North to Colorado, we stopped and visited Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. It wasn’t too far out of the way. This area was designated by President Obama in 2013. There are many good hiking trails. I was surprised to learn that the Rio Grande’s headwaters are in the mountains of Colorado. The river runs the length of New Mexico before turning Southeast along the border with Mexico, including the Big Bend. This part in Northern New Mexico is particularly scenic. We took the Slide Trail, and it was another great one. About 1.4 miles/570 feet up along the side of a cliff, with the river farther and farther below. Then we turned around and went back down. It’s called the Slide because of a landslide that we had to scramble over. We also stopped at a few other spots in the National Monument. It’s another keeper.
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| Slide Trail, Rio Grande del Norte NM |
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| Slide Trail, Rio Grande del Norte NM |
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| Slide Trail, Rio Grande del Norte NM |
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| Slide Trail, Rio Grande del Norte NM |
Great Sand Dunes NP, Colorado
Great Sand Dunes is named for a stunning 30-square-mile area of sand dunes that are surrounded by mountains in South Central Colorado. The scale is hard to believe. They’re the highest dunes in North America, and people climbing up (and sliding down) looked like ants from below. We didn’t climb – we just hiked alongside them a little and then did a short forest nature hike in another part of the park.
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| Great Sand Dunes NP |
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| Great Sand Dunes NP |
Also back in Alamosa, we went on a wild crane chase. We were looking for sandhill cranes in nearby Monte Vista National Wildlife Sanctuary but didn’t see any.
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| Sunrise over the Rio Grande during a run in Alamosa |
Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP, Colorado
The Visitor Center was open, but that was about all. The North Rim Road was closed, as was the South Rim Road past the Visitor Center. And for good measure, East Portal Road was also closed. We couldn't even do much of a hike because the trails were either complete mud or ice and snow. None of this was a surprise to us, but it was a disappointment nonetheless. As it was, we were only able to see the canyon from two viewpoints. What we were able to see, however, was absolutely fabulous! The canyon was beautiful. We enjoyed seeing what we could of it. Another cool thing: we saw a sedge of sandhill cranes flying in formation high above the canyon. They were squawking away and frolicking up in the sky.
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| Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP |
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| Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP |
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| Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP |
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| Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP |
The ride over from Alamosa was fantastic. We crossed the Continental Divide and then proceeded through Curecanti National Recreation Area. I hear that there's already a "Million-Dollar Highway;" this should at least be the "Nine-Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Highway."
Brief Interlude - Montrose
As planned, we stayed in Monrose after visiting the Black Canyon. With a full extra day to explore, I contacted my niece, Jen, to ask for recommendations. She told me that she was in the area as well, and invited us to visit and to join her for lunch. This was quite unexpected, and a nice surprise. Her place is in a stunning location with great mountain views. Lunch was nice as well. By the way, the drive from Montrose North to Jen's place isn't as scenic as some of the other surrounding areas, so she calls this part the "Two-Dollar-Highway."
Prior to the visit, Lady A. and I took a nice stroll along the Uncompahgre River. Afterward, we visited the interesting Ute Indian Museum in Montrose. It was a nice, relaxing day, just what we needed.
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| Ute Indian Museum in Montrose |
Jen asked that we deliver some paintings to her art gallery in Durango. Durango is on the way to Cortez, where we would be staying for our visit to Mesa Verde National Park. Now, about that ride down.
The drive from Montrose to Durango was fantastical. Mountain hairpin turns and steep drop-offs were the rule. Of course, the higher we got, the more snow there was. Luckily, it was a bright, clear day, so the road was clear. We stopped a few times for photos, but they don't do this true "Million Dollar Highway" justice. After the drive, it took some time for me to pry my hands away from the steering wheel.
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| Million Dollar Highway |
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| Million Dollar Highway |
Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
This park was much better than expected. It's 20 miles from the park boundary to the visitor center. This was nearly as beautiful, scary, and harrowing as the Million Dollar Highway, but there were at least a few guardrails. Past the visitor center, there were a couple of loop drives with pull-offs to see the cliff-dwellings. We could see forever from some vantage points. The cliff-dwellings made this special park much more so. We did some short hikes, but we weren't able to climb into the dwellings themselves. For that, you need a ranger-led expedition, and those weren't in operation.
One part of the park was closed for the season, but most of it was open. This park blew me away and left me wanting more.
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Mesa Verde NP
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| Mesa Verde NP |
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| Mesa Verde NP |
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| Mesa Verde NP |
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| Mesa Verde NP |
Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Colorado, and Hovenweep National Monument, Utah
For our visit to Mesa Verde, we stayed in Cortez, Colorado. Since we couldn't get enough of the cliff-dwelling Pueblo people and their history, we decided to also visit Canyons of the Ancients and Hovenweep National Monuments. At the archeological sites, we saw more stunning homes and villages of the ancient Pueblo people. Especially interesting was the Canyons of the Ancients visitor center and museum, as well as the loop hike around the Hovenweep Canyon.
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| Hovenweep NM |
We managed to walk into the wrong restaurant not once, but twice in Cortez. First, we walked into what we thought was the Wigglin' Pig, only to learn that it was the Shiloh Steakhouse, which we later learned was nearby. The next day, we walked into Once Upon a Sandwich, thinking it was Main Street Brewery, which was further down the road. These incidents worked out fine for us, but they just show to go you how clueless we can be.
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
Like some of the parks on this trip, this one is remote and difficult to get to; there are no cities anywhere nearby. We stayed overnight in Show Low, AZ, and even that metropolis is an hour away. The park extends both North and South of I-40. The Northern part includes the Painted Desert, petroglyphs, and pueblos; the Southern part contains the Petrified Forest itself. It also includes a huge amount of wind, or at least it did when we were there.
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| Painted Desert in Petrified Forest NP |
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| Blue Mesa in Petrified Forest NP |
North to South (the way we did it), the park drive is 26 miles long and runs from I-40, North for a short loop, and then back to the South entrance. We enjoyed both parts, and we stopped at nearly every pull-off to enjoy the scenery. We took a couple of short hikes, but the best one was the Crystal Forest Trail with so many chances to enjoy the petrified wood. It was eye-candy.
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| Crystal Forest Trail in Petrified Forest NP |
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| Crystal Forest Trail in Petrified Forest NP |
Albuquerque, New Mexico
After staying in Show Low, Arizona for the visit to Petrified Forest, we drove East to Albuquerque. But not before a stop at
Bandera Volcano and Ice Cave. We did the prescribed hike to look down into the volcano from the top. This was a fairly easy uphill hike amongst the lava flows, but the wind and the elevation made it a bit challenging. At about 8,000 feet, it is on the Continental Divide, just inside New Mexico. The area was in a nice alpine forest with Ponderosa Pines and Junipers. After seeing the 10,000-year-old volcano, we continued our hike to the ice cave. It's got year-round ice. Pretty cool.
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| Hiking up Bandera Volcano |
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| Bandera Volcano |
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| Ice Cave |
We had an additional full day in Albuquerque. We walked around the historic Old Town area and tasted wine at a local winery. We were never lost, but if we were, we could have made like Bugs Bunny and said, "
I knew I shoulda made that left turn at Albuquerque!"
The idea was to have a relaxing day before flying back home.
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| Casa Rondena winery in Albuquerque |
This trip, by the numbers,
2,857 driving miles
19.5 hiking miles
6 National Parks
6 National Monuments, although some were only drive-throughs
15 days on the road
3 citizenship checkpoints that aren't so bad if you're white
1 haboob
2 restaurants that turned out to be altogether different than what we thought they were
5 Fairfield Inns, 2 Days Inns, 1 Hampton Inn, 1 NP Lodge
11,018 feet of elevation during Million-Dollar-Highway drive
Besides the sedge of cranes, we encountered a few other notable examples of birds and other wildlife. There were a few unkindnesses of ravens, a smattering of individual roadrunners, bluebirds, and several types of jays. We spotted a gang of pronghorns, some mule and whitetail deer, a weasel, a couple picas, and probably a bunch of other critters that I forgot.
The Trump cuts to the National Park staff was noticeable, as services were reduced at several of them. We tried to not let this trouble us. Perhaps because of the staffing layoffs, some of the parks' entrance stations were not in operation, so visitors could just drive right in, and this stupidly reduces the parks' revenue.
The parks themselves are as pristine and wonderful as ever. Even better, though, was the exercise of getting to them. The joy, as they say, is in the journey.
