Camping and Hiking along the Gila River

We’ve spent a week boondocking in a horse corral between the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument visitor’s center and the trailhead to the cliff dwellings hike; in short, along the Gila River in western New Mexico. The Gila is one of the longest rivers in the West, with a gigantic watershed. People have lived along the Gila for more than 2000 years, and now it’s dry in many places because it’s used for broad agricultural irrigation and the water supply for Tucson and Phoenix. It still flows in sections here, though.

Our Campsite

When we showed up last Monday, no one had pulled into the two loops of this gravel drive with the occasional metal posts to tie your horses to, so we had it all to ourselves.

The view is from behind the trailer with the evening sun on the grasses; at some times of day you can see the lichen on the rock, at others you’re watching the vultures fly high above the road.

Tracy watches for different types of sparrows he’s seen only here, and Banjo gets good and dirty in the sun so she can help fill the trailer with dust and thorns. I’m not complaining; it is very, very quiet here and lovely in every direction.

The ant mounds in the field behind the trailer are huge, and solid. Where do the ants go? Straight down into this hard dirt? They remind me how much I love my cowboy boots.

Soon, of course, neighbors moved in, mostly folks with their horse trailers who go off each morning on trail rides. One couple pulled in with a horse, a mule, a miniature pony, and a miniature donkey. It took them about 20 minutes to unload the mule from their trailer, and their friends clapped. Sorry I didn’t get a photo of the minis for you; they’re so short in their makeshift pen that you can hardly see them. You can hear that mule, though!

Silver City

We took a day trip into nearby Silver City, and without the trailer behind the truck we could stop to take photos of the views. Too bad I left the real camera back in the trailer!

Silver City has the distinction of having been laid out and built before the first big rain came, and when it did it washed Main Street away. Today Main Street is a giant gully (officially, the Big Ditch), and the buildings on either side of it are all numbered even/odd from the original platting. My photos of the Big Ditch don’t do it justice because it’s crammed with debris and the cottonwoods that have grown along its sides. The town has developed a trail along it, though.

We ate a great local lunch with a dessert of sopapillas (a New Mexican handheld that’s lightly fried dough you eat with honey) and then visited the Western New Mexico University Museum, which houses the largest collection of Mimbres pottery in the world. Mimbres is the prehistoric culture that encompasses (but is not limited to) the people who live in the Gila cliffs.

I was so overwhelmed by the main floor museum displays—how professional, how beautiful, how gorgeous the pottery and jewelry and tools—that I never took a single photo. I did snap a few down in the basement where the displays were less formal, but still jaw-dropping.

In the basement I found a cabinet where every drawer you pull out reveals expertly woven shoes from yucca fronds, and a few baby shoes made from deer skin. Sorry my photos are terrible; the shoes were so astounding, and I had had a very large lunch. If we come back, I’d like to spend much more time gawking at the finds in this gem of a museum.

The whole time I was walking through, I was thinking of my friend Jacqui, who’s an archaeologist and who tells a story of putting her hands on a 40,000-year-old tool while she was on a dig in Syria and feeling overwhelmed with the sense that the last time someone had touched it may have been thousands of years ago. What a remarkable feeling that is—as close to time travel as we have, as Jacqui says. I knew when I touched these pottery sherds in the museum that many other people had touched them, but I still felt like a time traveler. (For you word enthusiasts, “sherd” is used instead of “shard” in archeological contexts, I’m pretty sure.)

Hiking in the Canyon

Several times we’ve gone hiking/bird watching along the canyons formed by the forks of the Gila.

There are undeveloped hot springs a little up the Middle Fork that no one was in when Tracy birdied by.

We spent one long morning hiking up the West Fork,

and all we did was look up at the towering canyon walls that have formed in so many beautiful ways.

On the drive to Silver City where more gentle slopes surround the Gila, the cottonwoods are budding out to a neon green, but here in this canyon they hadn’t started yet, so our views were unobstructed.

Very large ponderosa pines dot the hills and the canyons; some are home to the acorn woodpecker that stores acorns in perfect little holes up and down the trunks.

We hiked a generous five miles that morning, which isn’t a big deal for my knee anymore, but what was a triumph to me was the seven river crossings we made. Six for me, seeing as how I didn’t bother with the seventh, but then we turned around and made those six again, so twelve crossings in all for me.

None was a big deal, none over my knees or really swift, but they were all rocky and slick, so I walked across with great care, careful not to slip and twist and re-injure my knee.

So, for my knee, that hike was a triumph. And, I made another discovery: We looked up so much that I felt vertigo on that hike, which got me thinking about my inner ear problem being back, which means that maybe it wasn’t heights that created a problem at the cliff dwellings as much as vertigo. We actually climbed to the cliff dwellings a second time when we went on a tour guided by a birding ranger, although we didn’t enter the cliffs.

Life feels back to normal this week, in many ways. It’s true that the trailer is covered in dirt, inside and out, and that doesn’t matter except for the revolt of our sinuses. I don’t bother sweeping the rugs because that just stirs up the dirt. I do wipe down Banjo with the same baby wipes I use on myself.

We hike early and rest in the shade in the afternoon. We dry our hiking socks and shoes in the heat of the sun, we store up plenty of electricity to watch one episode of a TV show each night, which provides a needed sensory break from being outside all day each day, always looking and listening.

As soon as the sun sets, we close up the heat in the trailer so we won’t have to turn on the furnace until late that night. In the morning we open the shades to warm the inside. Boondocking provides a slow rhythm more driven by nature than when you’re in a campground, and I sure missed that.