The drive in from Austin really wasn’t so bad. I made it to Brownfield on a different route than I took this summer, but I felt the memory of the Celica calling me as I joined up for the highway through to Roswell. To mark the occasion, I pulled out the Celica soundtrack for the first time since I’d sold the car. Xterra the Younger is not fitted with a tapedeck, but I had all the songs on a flash drive. The long rural highway dotted with flashbacks to Canadian escapades. Come to think of it… those two tapes barely covered the 130 miles from Brownfield to Roswell. How many times did I listen to it over 5,000 miles? Maybe that’s why I know all the words…
Along the way, I drove directly into a sunset, and deployed an As Seen on TV Christmas present from my brother and his girlfriend!
The rest of the drive in was a lonely country road that weaved through the middle of nowhere, but did make a dramatic turn around the field that the famous Roswell UFO crash landed into. I turned up the forest road that George indicated, headed in the general direction of the GPS coordinates he indicated. About two miles in, I saw a George stumbling down the road toward me. I parked, and shortly after dark, Evan rolled in.
He took a route that didn’t go through Roswell, so he was on unpaved road for an addition 50 miles before he picked up the Jeep trail that George and I had set up camp on. It was in the thirties, down into the twenties, so I didn’t take too many photos because it’s hard to use my camera in mittens. But it was a gorgeous night.
Sunrise was bright. Car camping, on all counts, was pretty successful. We all have adjustments to make for New Year’s Eve, but this is a repeatable pattern.
In the Renegade Motel, George built a storage platform even with the front seat leaned forward which he can sleep on top of and pack underneath. For the Hotel Xterra, I folded down the rear passenger seat, removed (because it just clips out!) the passenger seat bottom, and dropped an Amazon box in the footwell to make the floor even and my-height-ish. The Rover Resort is missing its entire back row which had to be painstakingly unbolted, but leaves a massive (if not level) area for Evan and Miles.
We spent the morning and part of the afternoon headed up rocky Forest Service Road the forest, around a wilderness area, and into Capitan, NM for “breakfast” at 2pm. Capitan bills itself as the home of Smokey the Bear.
In 1944 during WW II the USFS decided to use a bear to spread the fire prevention message. They named him after a New York Assistant Fire Chief, “Smokey” Joe Martin. May 9, 1950, in the aftermath of a devastating fire in the Capitan Mountains, a badly burned cub was found. He became the living symbol of fire prevention, Smokey Bear. When Smokey grew old, plans were made for his retirement. The people of Capitan wanted their bear to be returned to his hometown. Upon his death in 1976, Smokey was flown home and buried in what is now Smokey Bear Historical Park [a small park with a museum in the center of Capitan, just outside the forest]. It became the only Park in New Mexico to be run by NM State Forestry.
Smokey Bear Historial Park, New Mexico Tourism Department
After lunch, we weaved along the scenic highway drive through the resort town of Ruidoso down the mountain into Alamogordo and there was a birthday!
Then we stopped for sunset at one of my favorite places, recently upgraded from National Monument status: White Sands National Park!
After that, we hopped on I-25 in Las Cruces up to Truth or Consequences, NM — called “T or C” by the locals and named after a television gameshow. We had a brew at the local brewery and called it a night. Tomorrow, we’ll head for San Lorenzo Canyon for New Year’s Eve.
