Bo's Journal #20-2 New Mexico

Welcome to my first dog blog!

Our next stop was Caballa Lake State Park near Truth or Consequences. The late rains in these areas meant we were blessed with the sights and smells of the desert blooming!





Any town with such a funny name as Truth or Consequences just had to be sniffed out so we took a day to wander around. The name came from a long running radio and television show popular in the 40’s and 50’s. When the show celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1950 they wanted a town somewhere in America to change its name to T or C so they could broadcast live from the town. Hot Springs, NM said it would change, it did, they did and history was made. The town is very funky, artistic and colorful. Kae and Cokie had a good time photographing the murals, fountains, buildings and the most amazing collection of Mogollon and Mimbres Indian pottery housed in an incredible local museum. Well worth the trip for all of us.

We were ever onward to Las Cruces and Leasburg State Park. This park was right near the Rio Grande but the river was so muddy and shallow at this point a guy couldn’t even get his elbows wet! We had planned to hang out there for a few days doing shopping, errands, maintenance and writing before heading for our next adventure – White Sands National Monument. Well, Folks, as we have certainly learned in our travels so far, life is full of surprises! Due to a credit card glitch and our mail trying to catch up with us we had to stay 2 more weeks. This is not the most beautiful park we have ever been in and the little nearby town of Radium Springs did not inspire us to poking around but I managed to create a really good sand pit to sleep in and my Gals got lots of writing and photo editing done, so we were happy enough.

A nice lady, Dagmar and her puppy pal, Thurra, told us about a BLM campground called Aguirre Springs up in the Organ Mtns., on the way to White Sands, so off we went. Trees! A creek! Cool mountains! We wanted to stay a while but a weather forecast for severe thunderstorms changed our minds and we split after two nights. We all agreed we will return here this coming winter to explore even more.

Traveling across the Tularosa Basin toward White Sands sure gives you a great sense of the expansiveness of this southwest: endless skies, dramatic storms, forever vistas!

White Sands National Monument is unlike any place we have been; this place screws up your senses because it looks like snow drifts but smells like chalk! Serious! This is 275 square miles of gypsum sand; pure white, sparkling and actually cool on the paw pads because it reflects the sunlight. These dunes can travel more than 30 feet in a year, constantly burying and exposing the few plants that have adapted like cottonwood trees and yucca. The roads are covered with drifting sand so they plow them just like snow. It’s a wildly strange place, but very beautiful in its own way.

Across the Tularosa Basin to Alamogordo and Oliver Lee State Park, another sweet spot just at the mouth of Dog Canyon in the Sacramento Mountains. The year around stream was my favorite thing, of course because it was almost deep enough to get me totally wet. Good smelly things here and skittery critters too. The yucca cactus had just finished blooming but the prickly pear, hedgehog cactus and ocotillo were just starting. This very canyon has a long history of use by the Mescalero Apaches and their forebearers, plus a few white settlers like Oliver Lee, a cattle rancher and ‘Frenchy’ Rochas, as vintner, orchardist and recluse. Remember that incredible spiral staircase in the Church in Santa Fe? Well theory has it that Frenchy was the mystery builder/carpenter. We hope so.

We used this park as a base for several day trips out and about to many interesting sites.
We will be ‘showing and telling’ in the next journal, so stay tuned.