Leasburg and beyond

Our group moved on Monday to Leasburg Dam State Park about 15 miles north of Las Cruces. As soon as we parked we went shopping in LC and finished up with me doing a Curves session. We got back in time for circle. We lost one gal and gained another. We had a campfire and a couple of biker's set up their tent near us and joined our campfire. They are from Baltimore, MD and are biking their way across the country. They average about 65 miles a day and are expecting to dip their toes in the Pacific in 3 weeks.

The group is going to stay here for 10 days and since it isn't the loveliest state park we've been in and they are bypassing Alamogordo, we decided to head out the next day after we found the NM SP geocache. We caught up with the SKP Boondocker's at the Moose Lodge in Alamogordo. We reacquainted ourselves with people we have met before at the afternoon social and learned what they have seen and what to do before heading out again. They are also touring the state parks. Trish planned all this and we are glad we finally caught up to them.

We drove a big loop on Wednesday. First we went up, up and away to Cloudcroft. At 9000' it was considerable cooler. In the 50's instead of the high 80's. Looking down into the basin we could see White Sands. We drove south 15 miles from there to Sunspot and a national observatory.
Actually there are two. One looks at the sun and the other Apache looks at the moon. At Sunspot there are about 65 residents. We met 2 of them from Ohio. One from Youngstown and one from Cortland. It is a small world. We didn't know them. When we left there Bob was curious about a town called Timberon. It had a lot of streets, golf course and airport but since it was far away from anywhere he thought it might be one of those planned towns that really didn't exist. But it does. We stopped at the golf course to see if we could get lunch but they were closed. The ladies there were doing bookwork and checked our maps to see if we could do a loop. They gave us directions, explained that there were 900 homes in the hills around there. 300 residents and the rest are summer residents. It truly is at the end of the road. In fact the road in was just paved 3 years ago. It is 35 miles from Cloudcroft. We continued south from there and 75% of the "road" was riverbed. We then headed west on more dirt road that took us thru Fort Bliss's bombing range. Luckily the gate was open and bombing completed for the day. We did get buzzed by 6 jets. Saw antelope. Back on the main road Rt 54 heading north
this picture shows the observatory at the top and Oliver Lee SP at the base. The white dots are rv's. We stopped at the State Park for a geocache. Oliver Lee was a settler here from Texas in the 1880's. He had been acquitted of 2 murders, became a senator and owned 1 million acres of range, stretching from Alamogordo to El Paso. During the great depression he lost it all.