Framedlight

  The time had come to leave Las Cruces and drive north to Albuquerque from where Anne and Michael were to fly home. I thought I would show you the house where we stayed in Las Cruces as it was very nice. Although probably built of breeze block, it had an adobe finish in line with much of the housing there. There were 3 bedrooms, a good sized living room and a small garden which looked over a large natural area before the beginning of Las Cruces commercial district. Michael had to do a work zoom meeting in the morning, so Alan, Anne and I went to the Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum that was very close to the house. The outside activities were rather limited as it was out of season but the interior exhibitions were very good. Especially one about the effects on the Tularosa Basin of the coming of the missile range and research into the atom bomb. Many ranchers and their families had to leave the homes and farms they had built up over years. Recompense was either limited or never rece...

 We decided that today would be a bit of a road trip. The Rio Grande flows through Las Cruces and we thought we would follow it north on a minor road until we reached the town of Hatch, famous for its chiles. As we drove away from the house in Las Cruces we got a good view of the Organ Mountains. The sky showed us that the hot weather we had been experiencing might well be coming to an end. At points along the way we could see the river that was meandering slowly and shrunkenly. We were starting to see large fields of chillies growing at the side of the road. An old road, the Camino Real had followed the course of the Rio Grande until it left the side of the river to travel north east to Santa Fe on the Jornado del Muerto. A camp had been set up at this junction, near the present town of Radium Springs, centuries before at Paraje de Robledo, which in the mid 19th century helped defend the local white population against attacks by the Apache. In 1861 the Confederate Army established...

Anne had found a great house in Las Cruces for us to stay in while we were in southern New Mexico and we were ideally placed for most of the things we wanted to see. Las Cruces lies on the flood plain of the Rio Grande on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and from the city you can see two chains of mountains, the Doña Ana to the north and the Organ Mountains to the east.  The Organ Mountains were established as a National Monument by President Obama in 2014 and rise sheer from the desert floor to a height of 9000 ft. The easiest walk starts at the Dripping Springs Visitor Centre and is a paved walk which leads to some interesting historical ruins and a pool and waterfall. It is only 4.8kms long. We had arrived late the previous evening and the day had started slowly, so the walk was begun rather late in the morning. It was fiercely hot which made the beginning of the route along the edge of the mountains rather slow. The path was crossed continuously by large grass hoppers which wh...