THIS is what brought us to Silver City in the first place

 Silver City is one of the coolest places that nobody has ever heard of, but how did we find it?  It happens to be the closes place to stay (if you consider a two-hour drive close) to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, one of the most interesting places we've been on our whole trip west.  Back in 1280, give or take a few years, the Mimbres people used rock and clay to build over 40 rooms inside 5 caves high on a cliff overlooking the Gila river.  They lived there for only about 30 years before abandoning it and moving on.  While looted by pot hunters in the 1880s, it is still well-preserved and well-managed by the National Park Service.  Visitors can walk through the rooms and imagine what it was like to live here 700 years ago.  Here are lots  of pictures because they speak for themselves.

A HUGE milestone on our journey West

 

Just past the incredibly quaint town of Pinos Altos, which is north of Silver City, we crossed the continental divide.

29 States!

We have a map on the side of our trailer with stick-on vinyl states, and we add a state once we have set foot in it with our RV. Here is the map as it stands today, reflecting our 2-1/2 years of RV travels.

 

I have to confess that we cheated with Michigan.  We were driving across I-80 and were so close to Michigan that we took a 10 minute detour and crossed the border.  But mostly we've been legitimate visitors to all these states and have camped overnight in 20 of them. #1 is Florida, with well over 200 nights and #2 is Tennesee, where we've spent about 60 nights. 

Javelina!

Silver City is the birthplace of Billy the Kid and Kit Carson. Now home to about 40 art galleries and lots of old hippies. We feel right at home. We saw this guy at the local coffee shop:

Javelina

 Silver City is a great destination that no one's ever hear of.  After stopping by the visitor information center, we are a bit overwhelmed with what there is to do here right now.  Just this weekend we have to choose between about 8 live music events, a street fair, a lighted holiday parade, a sky party where amateur astronomers bring their telescopes for people to view the skies (and this area has some of the darkest skies of anywhere in the country), an art fair and the last open weekend for the Little Toad Creek Inn and Tavern up into the Gila national forest north of here.  And we also have to visit the Gila Pueblo ruins (which is the reason we came to Silver City in the first place) and that is an all-day affair.  We may want to stay longer than we planned.

Billy the Kid's birthplace

This horse-drawn trolley travels the main street all day and evening

Silver City, New Mexico

This us a very cool and historic town. We will be here a week, so more to follow...

Guadalupe Mountauns

Back in Texas temporarily and driving past these beautiful mountains rising up out of the desert

Carlsbad Caverns

We were delayed getting on the road yesterday morning when we found ice had built up on top of our trailer slide-outs and I had to get up on the roof and sweep/shovel all the ice and snow off.  This took about two hours, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to walk around on an icy roof 12 feet off the ground with a 30 MPH wind whipping around.  At least the views were nice!

After a three-hour drive from Texas into New Mexico where we saw more many more oil wells than we had in Oklahoma (but we also got our first glimpse of a real Western mountain range, the Guadalupe Mountains), we settled into our campground at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns NP.  We got up early and ended up spending all day down in the cave.  We did the self-guided tour of the "big room" and ranger-led tours of the "Kings Palace" and the lower cave.  Having read a lot of peoples' comments about Carlsbad, I had high expectations--and they were exceeded.

This is a very spectacular natural wonder.  The beauty and variety of rock formations and the size of the big room (either 8 or 14 football fields, depending on which sign you read) affected me like very few places I've ever seen.  Being here on a relative off season, we wandered around the big room for 1-1/2 hours and felt like we owned it, other than a few rangers we never saw another person as we took in the features.  Pictures cannot come close to conveying what this place is like.


The ranger-guided tours were informative and fun, especially the tour of the "lower cave", which is not lit with electric lights so we had to wear hardhats with headlamps and special gloves so we could touch the rocks without damaging them (skin oils can eventually destroy the delicate crystal formations.  For three hours 12 of us descended knotted ropes, steel ladders
and slippery slopes; crawled through narrow openings, hit our heads on low-hanging rocks and even had to crawl on our hands and knees for about 15 feet through a tunnel with the only light being our headlamps.  Carlsbad doesn't get the "press" of the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, but it is every bit as amazing and wonder-inducing.

Exploring the lower cave

 

New Mexico sunset