City of Rocks, Silver City and the Gila National Forest

Nov. 10th, City of Rocks, Silver City and the Gila National Forest
This day the main plan was to drive up to Silver City which is about 100 miles from Las Cruces to take in the Catwalk National Trail which included waterfalls, picnic areas and plenty of opportunity to see birds and wildlife.
On the way to Silver City there is also the City of Rocks State Park. We stopped at it first. This state of New Mexico is just full of little surprises and City of Rocks State Park is one of them! You can't see it from the hiway but just a few miles off you come over a rise and there it is, a city of rocks. There are a jumble of large rock formations left after wind and water had worn away the softer rock leaving the harder volcanic rock.
There is camping and picnic areas at the park. All the campsites are named after constellations eg: Pleiades, Cygnus etc. There is also a small solar observatory there. During the busy season there are evening star talks by an astronomer.

Enjoying some shade. 25C this day.

John, caught between a rock and a hard place.

Lichens

We hiked around the rocks for a bit and then headed back down the road.
We came upon a huge tailings pond which I speculated must be from a mining operation nearby. This pile was huge! If you've ever seen the one at Agrium Redwater, multiply it by 100.

The tailings pond. There is a large crane on top of the pile.

When we got to Silver City we stopped at the Tourist Info. to get directions to the Catwalk Nat'l Rec Trail. The woman there was very sorry to inform us the the whole trail had been washed away in a huge flash flood just recently and there is no access and there is no foreseeable opening any time soon due to the chance of more floods because an earlier forest fire in the area has left the soil unstable. She said the whole area is ruined. How sad....
Seeing as we didn't have enough time to drive to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, as it was already 2pm, and it would take 2 hours to get there, she suggested we take the Scenic By-way road through the Gila National Forest. So we did.
On the road leading to the Nat'l Forest we found the mine that created the huge tailing pond. They extract copper and gold along with other minerals, as we were told by a couple who were also observing the pit.

As we started up into the mountains it was apparent why they call them Scenic By-ways. What a beautiful drive! Another winding two lane road through the forested mountains. We had our picnic lunch by a little stream. There were some type of oak trees growing along the stream.
The road took us through a couple of ghost towns, which are described on the map as: Towns with less than 100 people and no services. I did actually see a ghost in one of them. One of the few residents still had up their Halloween decorations, including a ghost. Ha haha.
The scenic by-way joined onto I25 and we sped back to Las Cruces, again, before dark.
I keep mentioning the "before dark" thing because as we travel in the day I see dead things on the roads. Lots of them! In NM it's mainly rabbits and coyotes. In the more northern states it was deer. You never see any of these animals during the day so they are out and about at night and that is the reason we don't like to drive at night.

  Gila National Forest:

The lake at Elephant Butte on the way to Las Cruces. "Elephant Butte...." :D