Okay… when I started writing these travel posts, I thought “Road to Nowhere” was the perfect title. I love the Talking Heads, and it tied in to our plans so nicely. Since then I’ve kind of boxed myself into using Talking Heads song titles for these posts, which wasn’t really my intention. I mentioned last week that I may have to move on to other songs, and my own uncle sent me some trash talk for giving up so quickly.
So, in honor of my Uncle Bob, let’s go with “These Memories Can’t Wait”, a wonderful diddy off “Fear of Music”. It does give me a chance to reuse this GIF one more time:
Two side notes before I get to the reason you’re reading this – the “Where’s Nico?” part. First off, there was a great late 80’s band called Living Colour that did a killer version of the song on their debut album, Vivid, which I recommend you all listen to on Spotify. I saw them open for the Rolling Stones on the Steel Wheels tour and really loved this version. Second, I mentioned my Uncle Bob. For the many of you reading this who don’t know who that is, Bob is one of my favorite people on this big ol’ planet. Here’s a pic of Bob and I at Bryce Canyon back in 2019:
Even though Bob is my uncle, he’s only about a decade older than me. We’ve had a lot of fun together over the years (and enjoyed a number of wonderful craft beers together!), and his ideas of retirement coincide a lot with mine. For the past few years, Bob has served as a search and rescue volunteer at Bryce Canyon, which I love and admire. We’ll be seeing him in the coming month or so when we get up that way, and I can’t wait! All the same, he did a fine job of shaming me into sticking with the Talking Heads a little bit longer….
Anyway… the question of the day is, where is Nico??
If you guessed Bisti Badlands in New Mexico, you’re either a genius savant or a creepy stalker!
After leaving the beautiful Wichita Mountains last week, we took a long drive to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. If Ghost Ranch sounds familiar to you, but you don’t know why, Georgia O’Keeffe lived on the property. At one point, Jesse Pinkman’s girlfriend who ends up OD’ing in front of Walter White took him up there on a date, if it sounds familiar to you from Breaking Bad. Also, the site has been used in movies like City Slickers. Anyway, it was a fun place for us to stay for a few days and enjoy some really great hikes.
I’m going to warn you now that this will be one of my longer posts. If you don’t make it through, I can’t blame you. I can get very chatty. But New Mexico is an amazing state. The state motto, “Land of Enchantment”, rings very true to me, because I’m utterly enchanted by this place, and not just because of the joy I’ve gotten this week from our porcelain beauty, the Dometic 310 RV toilet – although that’s been pretty enchanting too.
Last July, Kristen, Nico and I did a sort of test run for this trip, where we rented an RV and came down to Ghost Ranch and a few other spots, and we loved it. Anyway, I’d like to spend the rest of this post telling you about some of my favorite hikes in New Mexico from this week, and also recommending a few hikes from that trip last July that we didn’t include this year.
Plaza Blanca
This was a really cool hike we found on AllTrails in the area. The hike itself is on private property owned by a Muslim charity group called Dar Al Islam. These guys are unbelievably kind and accommodating to hikers. They do ask that you email them in advance, and they promptly respond with the pass code for the gate. Unlike many groups that have valued hiking trails on their properties, they charge nothing and don’t even have a way at the trail or on their website for you to even donate to their organization. Kristen and I both messaged them again after the hike to thank them and got very nice personal responses.
Anyway, as far as the hike itself – it’s very easy to navigate, with hardly any climb or rough terrain. And the scenery is amazing! It has hoodoos and slot canyons and fins – the kinds of things you may find in some of the Utah parks, but as the name Plaza Blanca may imply, unlike the orange/red tones of the Utah parks, this area is almost alabaster white. Georgia O’Keeffe was so taken by it that she did a series of paintings here, her “white palace”. We loved this hike! Here’s a few pics:
Ghost Ranch
There are a series of trails at Ghost Ranch. We did two of them this time – Kitchen Mesa and Matrimonial Point Trail. Both were nice – particularly Kitchen Mesa, although we ended up stopping about fifteen or twenty feet short of the mesa because frankly, the trail was pretty sketchy to navigate with a chihuahua, no matter how much he was excited to try to boulder up the place.
I will say, my favorite hike at Ghost Ranch is one we did last July – the hike to Chimney Rock. It’s not a very long trail, but does involve a bit of climb (maybe 600 feet or so) to get to the mesa next to Chimney Rock. It’s a great view from up there!
Rim Vista Trail
Carson National Forest is right next to Ghost Ranch. The out-and-back hike is about 6 miles or so and involves about 1300 feet of climb – but the climb is pretty gradual throughout the hike. I liked the view from the top, and the hike down offered some spectacular views as well (plus it’s on the way down, which is always nice!).
After three nights at Ghost Ranch, we headed out to Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness Area, which is maintained by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). We were very excited about this stop because we plan on spending a lot of time boondocking on public lands on this trip, and this was our first true boondocking experience. If you’ve heard the term “boondocking” but are unfamiliar with what it exactly entails, there’s a tremendous amount of beautiful country where you are allowed to camp for no cost. It’s all first come/first served, and it’s often called “primitive camping”, because there’s usually no public bathrooms or showers, no water, no electricity, and no “dump stations” (dump stations are where you get rid of your used water, kept in your RV in what are called gray tanks for your shower and sink waste water, and black tanks for your toilet waste water). We feel like we’re pretty well set for boondocking – we have plenty of solar power and lithium ion battery capacity, we have large fresh water and black and gray water tanks, and we have Starlink for satellite internet access. We also have some bladders that would let us shuttle in additional fresh water if needed, or in another bladder, shuttle out waste water if needed.
Anyway, boondocking at Bisti was a big success. After we got all set up, we went for a hike very close to our site through the Bisti Badlands. It’s about a four and a half mile trail without much climb. The highlight for me was the Chocolate Hoodoos, which you get to hike right on top of. I also enjoyed an area called ‘Cracked Eggs’, and the petrified wood at the far point in the hike.
Pueblo Alto Trail
The next day, we drove over to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, or “Chaco Canyon”. This place is also UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is truly unique. There are a series of ruins from buildings that were created by the Chacoans in the ninth through twelfth centuries, and are in pretty remarkable condition. It’s believed to have been a major trading hub with people coming from many, many hundreds of miles to trade goods. There’s also a lot to the construction that indicates the Chacoans were extraordinarily advanced when it came to their understandings of solar and lunar cycles. And we did a wonderful hiking trail there called the Pueblo Alto trail. The trail is about five and a half miles, and while the elevation gain is only a bit over 500 feet, it’s a very steep climb through a very tight crevasse. It’s a loop trail, and you actually go down a second crevasse on the way down that is even tighter. It was fun to navigate, but consider if that would be an issue for you before attempting it. The trail gives you a great view of the the ruins from above, and there are a few other ruins on top of the mesa, as well as plenty of pottery fragments and other cool stuff to see up there. We had a great view from up there as we enjoyed lunch together. One other caution I’ll throw out there when mentioning Chaco Canyon. There are two roads into the canyon – one is terrible and the other one is worse! We made it fine in our Silverado, but if you’re in a regular car, take it very easy and know it’s a bit of a slog to get there.
Even though we didn’t do these trails on this trip, I did want to mention a few more trails we really enjoyed from our trip last July, in case you’re interested in going to New Mexico. The only reason we skipped these areas this year is we were traveling in April, and most of these trails were still snow covered at this point.
Williams Lake
This is a really pretty hike in Taos, where you do about a thousand feet of climb and end up at an elevation over eleven thousand feet, as I recall. The apex of the hike is at Williams Lake, as the name implies. This was the first hike we did where we could tell Nico was meant to be a mountain dog. He shot up the rocks and left other hikers stunned at his mountain dog skills. The road up to the trail head here is very steep – take the drive up cautiously!
Jimez National Forest
We camped up in Jimez National Forest during our July trip and did two hikes we really enjoyed there. The first one was to McCauley Hot Springs – we enjoyed that trail so much we did it twice! It was fun to watch Nico take his first swim in the hot springs. The second was the Jemez East River Slot Canyon – it leads to a really cool waterfall, and gives you plenty of time hiking through the stream, which was a lot of fun too.
Anyway, it’s been another wonderful week! If you get a chance, I highly recommend including New Mexico in your travel plans!
– Ken 4/19/2024
Where’s Nico? 
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