Guys.

Guys!

GUYS!

WE ARE SLEEPING ON NEW MEXICO!!!

How have we never heard about how incredible this state is?

I’m telling the truth when I say that New Mexico is a state about which I knew nothing before this trip. I can spout off state capitals and histories and the national parks therein of almost every state in the Union. Where’s the best skiing in New Hampshire? Franconia Notch. What’s the highest point in Kansas? If you don’t count the highway overpasses, a hill o’beans named Mount Sunflower. What’s Idaho got going on? Craters of the Moon and the Sawtooth Mountains are pretty cool as far as I’m told.

But New Mexico? Nothing. I knew about the Taos Pueblo and its revolt in 1680 (the first successful large-scale Indian revolt), but that was it. It was the state that best posed the “paradox of the least interesting number”; if you have a set of numbers (transposed here to our 50 states) and declare one among the set to be “the least interesting number”, doesn’t the quality of being “the least interesting number” make that number more interesting? That is the position for which Iowa, Nebraska, and New Mexico have all jockeyed in my head for as long as I can remember (this used to be a four-horse race, but North Dakota has a national park for the Badlands and a town called Medina that I have a long story about [text me if you want to learn that spooky tale]).

I couldn’t have been more wrong to lump the newest Mexico in with that cornhusking company!

I made it to Carlsbad, in the southeast corner of the state, two days after leaving Louisiana. Carlsbad itself is a dusty roughneck’s town (the Permian basin drilling in west Texas has been big business in the last few years), but I came for the Caverns.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park seems unassuming at first:

You know, ’cause it’s a hole in the ground. Yeah, it’s a big hole in the ground, but we have plenty of holes in the ground back home (just take a drive down M-53!) (Easy SE Michigan joke). But when you approach the hole,

You start to realize:

“Oh this isn’t just some hole. This is the path into hell itself.”

The descent is truly surreal. The air coming from the cavern is cool and damp, and you are drawn down into it like krill into the maw of the whale; the prey fails to identify the predator because the predator is bigger than anything the prey can comprehend. The shadows of visitors waver and flag in strange and etherial ways off the enormous cavern walls. Your eyes widen both from the darkness and the gravity of your descent; you are following Plato, and Dante, and Orpheus down to the place you never thought you’d know. The damp cave air tousles your hair; its fingers brush your cheek and you find yourself not marching, but drifting into the depths.

And to what does the hand of hell deliver you?

All the beauties of the underworld you were never meant to see.

At the end of this journey into the afterlife there is an elevator that conveniently takes you into the park’s gift shop! This was much nicer than having to hike back out, albeit none of those magnificent caverns look the same from two angles. As you can tell from my purple prose, I found the caverns to be extremely compelling, and haunting; I highly recommend you all engage in the allegory of this cave on your own at some point.

🎶Back to the land of the living🎶

When I got back to my campsite at an RV park in town (there was only Backcountry camping aboveground at the caverns), I found that everything in my tent was caked with dust. This is a dry and dusty part of the country by nature, but the constant drone of big rigs and dooley F-250s streaming into and out of the desert do much to paint all your belongings in a quarter inch of mid-90s beige. If you’ve ever had a McDonald’s hashbrown, you’ve known the color, grit, and texture of my bedspread that night. The taste was different though: I got plenty of that, despite trying to sleep through the night with a mask on.

Next morning, I wiped down everything as best I could and packed all my soil-coated linens into a trash bag (along with about an acre and a half of New Mexican desert). This was a major headache to deal with and I tried to avoid this much dust again by driving through the piney Sacramento Mountains west of town, rather than down and around them through the dusty plains. And these mountains were beautiful!

Despite being so far south (on the same latitude as Jackson, Mississippi), the Sacramento’s are high enough (8000′) to get consistent snow in winter:

Enough snow, apparently, to sustain the country’s southernmost ski hill! There was a couple square inches of corn I spotted up the hill that definitely looked shreddable. Ah well ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I thought that by coming into this mountain territory I would have escaped all the dust from the plains near Carlsbad. However, as I was starting to descend the mountains into the Rio Grande Valley below, I realized that I was far, far from escaping all that windblown Earth:

The elevation of this shot was about 8000′; the valley floor was around ‘4500. Even with some parallax going on, those dust clouds were easily 1500′-2000’ high.

Absolutely biblical. I was endlessly glad I had booked a KOA cabin in the for the night, in the valley town of Alamogordo.

When I headed out the next day, I found that the source of the acres of dust was apparently White Sands National Park. It was pretty cool! But I was mighty tired of the crops beginning to sprout from all of the horizontal surfaces in my car so I finally beat feet for Taos, to spend a couple of days in the northern part of the state.

And what a couple of days it was:

Even this low state of the Rio Grande is considered “flood stage”. The river travels in a deep gorge through much of the northern part of the state.

As many know, the most famous part of Taos is the Pueblo: a community of Tiwan-speaking Native Americans that has been inhabited continuously for over 1000 years. There are other pueblos in northern New Mexico, but Taos is the largest and oldest:

Photography is limited throughout the pueblo for religious reasons, and photographing a member of the community without their consent is prohibited, so I hesitated in taking too many photos. As explained by our tour guide (who grew up in the pueblo herself) the individual homes in the pueblo are 1- to 3-room “apartments” inhabited by the ancestral families of the pueblo. Some homes are apartments built into a larger block, as seen above, while some are standalone homes or they abutt just one other home. The apartments lack running water and electricity but there are bathhouses, clean water, and communal areas provided by the tribal authority just outside of the historic area. Living in the pueblo is free: all a puebloan person needs to do is prove an ancestral connection to the pueblo and they can move into one of the traditional homes. About 20% of the Taos Puebloan people live in the traditional pueblo, while 60% live on the broader reservation, and the remaining 20% lives in the town or further afield.

As the tour guide stressed, the Taos Pueblo is a living community, which is why the Puebloan people go about in modern clothes, have cell phones, shop for groceries at Safeway, and often work in town. The pueblo is not a museum or a reenactment community; this is puebloan people living in the same way they always have, which ebbs and flows with all changes in time. After all, you don’t see me donning knee breeches and a waistcoat just because my apartment was built in 1830. I stress this because I found it very compelling; when your general school education summarizes native American history as “the Indians were here, we had a big turkey dinner together, and then they all ‘went away’ and built some casinos”, the Taos Pueblo is a pointed reminder that Native America is far more ancient, storied, and resilient than the USA has ever been.

The Taos Pueblo graveyard, built in the ruins of an 18th-century church which was shelled by US artillery during the Mexican-American War. The story of what happened here cannot be done justice by a semi-flippant travel blog, but I highly recommend reading up on Pueblo history, especially the 1680 Pueblo Revolt and the landback successes of the 1970s.

One cool thing found both inside and outside the pueblo are these big garlands of dried chile peppers:

These garlands, called Ristras, are the traditional way of drying and preserving hatch chili peppers for use throughout the year. These things are everywhere in northern New Mexico, from front doors to balconies to fences in homes all across the north of the state, and even hanging from lamposts in the state capital of Santa Fe (where I took this photo). What a cool and endlessly practical way to spice up your cooking!

The last thing I got up to in Taos before moving on was to try to do some hiking. I originally, very optimistically, considered bagging Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico at 13,173′. I have done hikes that are longer, higher, and have more vertical change than what Wheeler Peak requires, but when I got to the trailhead and literally saw people coming down in skis and snowshoes, I thought “maybe this highpoint can wait until summer”. I instead opted to hike the easier half of the loop up to a small lake:

“Easier” being relative, to like, actual ice climbing. This hike absolutely leveled me; the snow was still around 6 feet deep from the trailhead to the lake, and it wasn’t very strong snow, as I and many other day hikers discovered by repeatedly plunging into the snow up to our waists. This happened about every 5 steps, and the snow was often weak in all directions from there, so your only option was to sort of “wade out” of the loose snow to more tightly packed stuff. This hike was also steep as heck:

Compare the trees, growing straight up, to the slope I tried to Sisyphus my way on up.

It honestly took me 3 hours just to get through those 2.2 miles up the trail to the lake. But when I arrived?

Well, it was very pretty! The lake was still frozen over, but whatever, it was still pretty on the whole. It only took me an hour to make it back.

One more interesting thing I noticed on the drive back to camp:

Have you ever done a double take so hard you got whiplash? I did. Have you ever felt like you’ve just seen your own headstone? I did. Extremely spooky feeling.

But then I reconsidered: you know what, Evan Earl of New Mexico? You picked a pretty good part of the country to be remembered in:

For those that don’t get the reference, my full name is Evan Earl Lee.

With Wheeler Peak having successfully conquered me, it was time to keep moving on. The next day I packed up my gear in Taos and made it down to Santa Fe, in order to start heading west again. Santa Fe was really beautiful, and has an extremely charming downtown plaza with vendors selling wares:

I was meaning to head north and west through the state to go to Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, but I had issues with getting reservations for those things at the times that I wanted, so I am heading west first to explore the world’s most famous hole in the ground. I will probably double back for Mesa Verde, as well as to explore the Navajo Nation, in the next 4-5 days.

Sorry for the delays in this post guys, it was a longer spell between laundry loads this time. I’ll try to get back to uploading 1-2 times a week when I have reliable internet.

Back to the road for now,

Stay well everyone,

Evan 💙