Magnus in New Mexico, Day 10

Wed 27 Mar

Went to Las Cruces farmer's market--only four vendors and nothing we needed although the huge bags of dried chili peppers were tempting. Should have bought one of the bags of ground chiles. Then Mesilla, the square. It was historically interesting--

 

 

Then on to Dripping Springs National Monument. Cool place!  The hike to the springs was 1.5 miles, which I guess meant round trip, so we didn't risk it with Ed's hip the way it is. The guys in the visitor center said the walk to the cave was only .9 miles, so we did that. Unfortunately it was all downhill to the cave, which was really just an overhang but a nice big one. After Ed walked downhill for almost a mile, he wasn't inclined to go back up since we could clearly see on the map that there was a parking area on about the same level as the cave, in a different direction. So I hiked back up to get the Jeep and let Ed mosey on over to the closer parking area and bathroom.

The coolest thing was, that with the additional elevation and the clear sunny skies, you could see all the way to snow-capped mountains to the west.  My guess that that they were the mountains of the Gila National Forest.

 

 The cave

 Mountains in the distance

After that we drove to the day use/picnic area of our park so that Ed could see the Colorado river up close.  And a Phainopepla.  And stopped at Fort Selden but didn't go on the tour. The old for ruins looked really cool but it cost money and we couldn't take the dog in the museum to access the ruins trail outside, behind a fence. No matter.

When we returned Molly and got a really long walk down the Mogollon trail. I thought I could get onto it by going all the way to the southern end of the park, but there was no connecting trail. So we walked down there and then walked back to the connector, then over to the canal and across the bridge. In the day use area the Phainopepla of the day before wasn't there (since I had my camera this time), so we went on all the way back to the bridge at the north end, which took us to the group camp. And down the hill to home! 

Lovely itty bitty park. Lots of birds, too. There were swallows in the canal that were most likely Violet-Green Swallows, but without my camera I was never able to get a good enough look at them. Swallows in motion are impossible!

And I finally saw a Verdin!!! Lifer for me.

No picture of the Verdin, though. 

This is just a yucca in bloom --

 

 

Train going by our campsite