Where’s Nico?

Well hello again friends! Thought that I’d forgotten about you? Why of course not! After heading home for a couple of months to take care of some health stuff, we are back out on the road!

I will say – in my last post, when we got home at the start of March, I mentioned that we’d stick with Tom Petty song titles when we did future blog posts once we got back out on the road. And I’m guessing that if Tom Petty were around, he’d be excited to see which song titles we went with after being home for a couple of months.

Well, in the intervening two and a half months, we ended up watching the new Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown”, and that got us listening to a bunch of old Dylan stuff. So we decided to call an audible and go with Dylan songs for blog post titles for this trip. Sorry about that, Mr. Petty.

Ooof… He took that harder than I feared. Bob, you cool with this?

Well, I guess it’s a go then. That’s ice cold, Bob.

Anyway, “Drifter’s Escape” was from an album called John Wesley Harding, that came out in 1967. It was the year after Dylan’s motorcycle accident, and the whole album kind of explores themes around the American West. And speaking of the American West… where is that drifter, Nico, at right now?

Gila National Forest!

This is our first time in Gila, and it’s a really great hidden gem in southwestern New Mexico. For those who have never heard of Gila National Forest, it’s pretty removed from everything. There’s not really a gas station within an hour and a half of where we’re camping, aside from a very small store that’s only open for five or six hours a day, five days a week and has one old pump behind a fence that you can access if you’re desperate (and somewhat rich).

There are two paths to get into the main part of Gila, and one is rough enough that they discourage people who are hauling campers from trying it. We took the other road, and it was definitely navigable, but it was a lot of windy road climbing up and down and in and out through mountains and ravines.

We set up camp about a half mile from the visitor’s center, in an area that is largely used for folks with horse trailers. We had a good bit of real estate to ourselves with a nice view from our “front porch”.

From our campground, we can walk to a lot of nice trailheads. So far, we’ve done a handful of hikes here, and they’ve been very nice. The first featured some petroglyphs and some ruins of old Native American structures.

The second hike led us to a natural hot spring. It was pretty neat – the water was very hot where it was coming out of the ground (around 140 degrees), but as it mixed with river water, there were plenty of very comfortable areas to relax. As you can see from the pictures, folks have put a lot of effort into capturing separate pool areas for you to try out.

We enjoyed the springs enough that we went back to enjoy a river day there, relaxing in the water with some chairs and Nico’s Barbie pillow.

We also enjoyed a hike to Little Bear Canyon, although I think Nico’s feet were a bit worn out by the end.

The other trail we’ve hit, which was my favorite so far, unfortunately didn’t allow dogs – I’m not sure if that was to Nico’s chagrin or delight. In any case, there are some truly spectacular 800 year old Mogollon cave dwellings that you can explore here. The trail is only 1.2 miles, and the trail itself is really beautiful. And the ruins are amazing!

It’s pretty cool to have hikes like these available to walk to right from your campsite, and to virtually have this entire amazing area to yourself.

We plan on sticking around Gila for a while to really take it in. In addition to the ruins and the hot springs, the area has a lot of great birds and the rock formations are really nice. We use a free app called ‘Merlin’ by Cornell University that helps identify bird calls, and in the morning, you can fill the screen with all the different birds in the area. And speaking of birds, we do have the hummingbird feeders out, and we have some new friends that have been coming by to explore them. I got this picture just looking right outside our bedroom window:

We’ve had situations where hummingbirds were literally queueing up waiting their turn at the feeder. This area has a variety of different types of hummingbirds, and they are really fun.

We’ve seen some deer in the area and lots of small lizards. The rangers told us there are several types of snakes around here, but we haven’t seen any yet. They also told us there are javelina in the area, which we would LOVE to see in the wild!

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We actually headed out of town back on May 9th, when we made the drive down to Doris Campground at Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s a park we hit back in April of last year and really enjoyed. It was fun to see the park a month later in the calendar, as there were a lot more wildflowers around this time.

Oh – speaking of flowers… at our home, we have some irises that grow every year right between the front corner of our house and our driveway. Pretty much every year, I clumsily tromp over them and destroy the plants before we ever get flowers, to Kristen’s chagrin. Well I was careful this year to protect them, but we didn’t know if they would bloom before we left town. They hadn’t fully bloomed as of the night before we left. Then at the last minute, as we packed up the last items and prepared to leave town, this happened:

We took that as a good omen!

Anyway, in addition to the flowers, Wichita Mountain has tons of bison and longhorns and these really cool, colorful lizards.

There’s a lot of red rock here, and Nico enjoyed the hikes.

After Wichita Mountain, we headed down to Caprock Canyon State Park for a few days. This park may also sound familiar, as we had visited it back in January in our first trip this year. Back then, we had to leave earlier than we had wanted to because the overnight lows were cold enough that we worried about the water lines in our trailer. Well, no need to worry about that in May!

Back in January, we saw plenty of bison, mule deer and prairie dogs, along with a couple of roadrunners. This time, we saw the same assortment, only there were a bunch of prairie dog babies that had joined the herd.

From Caprock, we did an overnight at a winery just north of Alamogordo, and then arrived here at Gila. The winery made for a nice place to spend the evening.

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The trip hasn’t been without a few challenges. That’s kind of a constant when you live on the road like this. The first challenge was when we arrived at Caprock. There are several steps you take when you get to your campsite – you have to secure the trailer wheels, unhitch from the truck, level the trailer out, add stabilizers to the corners, extend the slide outs, get the satellite internet set up, get the “front porch” set up with an outdoor carpet, folding chairs and a bed for Nico, and sweep the inside after all the stuff got shaken around during the drive. There’s a similar list of things to do before you’re breaking down a camp too.

Well, one step when setting up camp is to unhook a power cable that goes from the truck to the trailer, which triggers the trailer brakes as well as the turn signals and brake lights. As we were unhitching, that cable was unplugged, but it was trapped on the far side of the trailer hitch, and as I pulled the truck forward, it tore the cable out. And I said “as WE were unhitching”, but as you can probably guess, the culprit who put the power cable in the spot where it could get caught on the hitch was not Nico, and it wasn’t Kristen. It was yours truly.

Thankfully Kristen is an electrical engineer who could put MacGyver to shame.

She was able to jerry rig the power cable so that it would still work. We ordered a new cable to an Amazon Locker drop box, and kept the jerry rigged cable as a backup.

The second obstacle we’ve hit is our awning. Our trailer came with a motorized awning that extends along the side of the trailer and goes out about eight feet to give you a little shade. Motorized awnings are nice in that it saves you from having to manually extend it, but the motors often aren’t really built to last, literally using plastic gears that can get shredded as wind pulls at the awning. We had some issues with the cables that powered the awning late in our stay in Yuma back in February, which Kristen addressed by replacing the wiring while we were home. But as we initially arrived in Gila, the motor simply gave out while we had the awning fully extended. We ended up having to strap the awning arms against the side of our trailer, and we’ve ordered a manual awning to replace this thing. Unfortunately, we won’t get the new awning and have a chance to replace this for a week or so. But that will just make for the opportunity for another adventure along our trip!

Until next time, my friends, I’ll leave you with a quote from a hiker we encountered as we hiked to Bear Canyon that pretty aptly describes how people feel when we encounter them in amazing places like this:

– Ken, 5/21/ 2025