Elephant Butte to Rockhound State Park NM

Today we moved from Elephant Butte park to Rockhound State Park. Rockhound is a bit southwest of Deming NM. We got the last non-reservable site in the park, by arriving about 10 am.

On the way we finally saw some renewable-energy sites. New Mexico has so much sun and wind it seems a natural for solar and/or wind power, but we've seen very little of it. Today though:

A good-sized solar farm

Later on, a large wind-and-solar installation. Thousands of solar panels.

 

We've found Rockhound state park unexpectedly scenic and nice. It's billed as a primitive park, but we have electric and water hookups in the group site we're in. The main washrooms are open (!) and FAR superior to the Elephant Butte ones. At Elephant Butte we found the distributed vault toilets far nicer than the central one.

The site itself is level and serviced, in their Group area

 

Here are some views around the small park: 

Very green Ocotillo, but no flowers yet

A Claret Cup cactus with lots of cups

Looks like a storm approaching

Yep, it stayed for a little while

After the storm, clear again

The park office is an attractive adobe building

Here's a map of today's route:

Another day spent close to "home"

Just relaxing in the shade this afternoon. It is 27 degrees C and sunny with a light breeze. Can't get much better than that.

How many morning quail do you see?

 

This morning we went in to soak at the La Paloma hot springs in an old part of Truth or Consequences. It is $7 each for a half hour soak. This is the third or fourth time we've done this over the years, and we have never got past 20 or 25 minutes before we feel light headed, mellowed out and (more) wrinkled. It is all good though!

Afterwards we went and got some more apples at Walmart, our second bag of a kind called Sweet Tango.  Just so crisp and sweet, we actually like them better than Honeycrisp.  

Under the solar-panel canopy at Walmart. The birds like it too.

 
Treated ourselves to a very late breakfast out from the Denny's seniors menu and hung around the campsite the rest of the day.

Campsite wildlife

A lovely afternoon at our site

Tomorrow we're heading to another state park, Rockhound, just southeast of Deming. We may not get in there as the weekends especially are quite busy with campers this time of year down this way, and we can understand why.  

Road trip today, to Choride and beyond

Yesterday was a rest day; we didn't go anywhere, just relaxed, read and enjoyed the sunshine. Today was a different story.

We decided to revisit the little "town" of Chloride, a revived ghost town (for more info, click link Here). We'd been here a couple of times before, but this time were going to make a loop trip out of it.

Last night though, we had another nice little campfire with scrap wood from my woodworking days:

On the way to town we noticed a thoughtful reminder sign in one of the low spots that flood periodically::

 

On the way to Chloride we were amazed at the flowers in bloom. We've been here in the winter before, no flowers then that we can remember, as this is mainly high desert country:

We do find lovely roads to travel:

 

Looking back from where we came

Almost to Chloride, somebody decided to stop and settle here

The famous Chloride Hangin' Tree

 

Once back to to the main road (Rd 52) we continued North to make a loop. There was over 50 miles of gravel along the way to Rd 60, a long and dusty route:

We weren't sure this antelope was real

but he did move

Ranch land through here, scattered cattle herds

More dreams dried up and blown away

A large ranch along the way

This looked like a barn/line hut for the Wahoo ranch

Remember I said it was dusty? Well, here's Dusty NM, the whole "town"

These little gourds were close to tennis-ball size, just growing wild

Another antelope, pretty unafraid of the van

No sign of anyone that might get mail here

We started to see white structures out in the flat plains, not sure what they were. It turns out they make up a Very Large Array (VLA) that peeks out into space with huge coordinated radio-telescopes. There is information Here if you'd like to know more details.

We were able to get a tour of this fascinating facility, including a 24 minute video about it. You can see the video HERE if you're interested in learning more. 

The dishes are about 80 feet across

The same dish as the previous shot, dish is on the move

The dishes can be moved anywhere along 26 miles of track, in a Y shaped arrangement

 This array has been active since the 1980's, and the electronics etc have been almost totally rebuilt over the past 10 years.

Map of today's drive. Contrary to Google's estimate, the drive took us about 9 hours including the VLA tour, averaging about 20 Kph in the gravel stretches: