Hidden Valley Ranch Campground - Working Cattle Ranch - More Petroglyphs

Tuesday we moved from Mountain Meadows RV Park in Tularosa, New Mexico to Hidden Valley Ranch in Deming, New Mexico (full hookups and all the salad dressing you can eat!).  Actually, this is a working cattle ranch with hundreds of head of cattle - most of which are out on the range - we saw quite a few on the drive in.  

Our Route

Entrance to the ranch/campground

Our Site

View From Our Site

View of the ranch and campground from a hill behind the office (click to enlarge)

Views from around the ranch

View of part of the 7 mile long dirt road to get to the ranch

There is a petroglyph site just a few hundred yards from the campground - 100's of petroglyphs  about 800-1000 years old.

View from petroglyph site showing the campground in the background

Lots of wildlife - Jack Rabbit (below), Coyotes, Road Runners, etc.  - I've been trying to get a picture of a road runner for a couple of weeks with no success - they are really almost as fast as in the cartoons

Lots of types of cactus

The Cane Cholla cactus are starting to bloom

Cloudcroft, New Mexico - Elevation 8700 Feet

On Saturday we visited Cloudcroft, New Mexico, a small resort village located in the Sacramento Mountains at an elevation of about 8700 feet.  It was 70 degrees in the desert when we left and 40 degrees at Cloudcroft when we got there.   The town has many shops and is located in the Lincoln National Forest which has many hiking trails mainly on the old rail bed of the El Paso and Northeastern Railroad built in the late 1800's.

The Downtown Area

Donna, Darby and an 8 foot wooden Indian

We hiked one of the trails to one of the many railroad trestle bridges.  We only went two miles but it seemed like five at the 8700 foot altitude.

View from the trail - the white near the center of the image is White Sands 4400 feet below (the White Sands are at 4300 feet elevation) and about 30 miles away.

One of the unique bridges on the railroad route

The bridge collapsed in 1960 - this is what is left