An odyssey through campgrounds and canyons

Smokey the Bear thinks I’m a jerk and so does Wayne Dunsworth.

Dunsworth swings out of a dinged-up Ford and walks over to my campsite armed with a safety lecture. It seems my campfire was still smoldering when I left for a hike this morning and he had to douse it.

Dunsworth and his wife, Oleta, help run Westlake, a woodsy, 71-site campground adjacent to Bonito Lake. This spring, the surrounding Lincoln National Forest is bone dry; every Smokey the Bear sign proclaims the fire danger “extreme.” The whole state’s dry, in fact. (Because of the fire danger, in the last two weeks some of the state’s campgrounds and trails have been closed, including several in Lincoln.) When I left Albuquerque a day earlier, a 15,000-acre wildfire was burning through Bandelier National Monument northwest of Santa Fe.

I make a groveling apology. But the damage is done. Dunsworth has written me off as knucklehead from The Coast. He looks at my fire pit, filled with drowned ashes. “How long are you staying here?” he asks.

Not long. I have just six days for a hiking-camping-nosing-around-country-towns trip in southern New Mexico. In order to beat the heat already building in late April, I’ve decided to stick mostly to two mountainous national forests: Lincoln, to the southeast of Albuquerque, and Gila, to the southwest. Both rise out of surrounding deserts like cool, green islands. (At 3.3 million acres, the Gila National Forest is more like a subcontinent.) For the rest of my trip, I’m on my best campfire behavior. And I discover two advantages to the drought: Everybody wants to talk about it, and hiking conditions are perfect.

This is a five-hike camping trip. I drive to Westlake from Albuquerque on a Sunday afternoon. The next morning is hike No. 1, starting just three miles from the campground. As I drive to the trailhead, about 20 miles northwest of Ruidoso, six shaggy elk lope across the dirt road--an omen, I hope, of outdoorsy adventures to come.

The nine-mile loop of Big Bonito Trail starts in pines, but aspens soon appear, along with aspen graffiti. It looks like “Tish” has done some trunk-carving here. After an uphill 90 minutes, the peaks of White Horse Hill and Elk Point come into view. They’re covered in dry alpine grass the color of wheat.

From switchbacks high on White Horse, I can see the barren Tularosa Basin to the west. The basin’s 40-mile-long El Malpais lava beds look like tar spilled on a dirt road.

*

The next day’s itinerary is full: drive down to Three Rivers Petroglyph National Recreation Site for a hike; drive up into the Sacramento Mountains to camp near the old logging town of Cloudcroft. So I don’t mind too much when my wake-up call--dueling hoot-owls above my tent--comes at 5 a.m.

As I leave Westlake, fire fully doused, Oleta Dunsworth tells me the drought is New Mexico’s worst in 30 years. “Have a safe trip,” she says cheerily.

Southern New Mexico feels Old West. The high plateaus are dotted with longhorn cattle, former boom towns and rock shops. Scratch a mini-mall and find mining, logging or cattle rustling. Country music dominates the radio dial. El Paso is closer than Albuquerque. A camping trip here becomes a fun visit to Frontier Land.

In the town of Lincoln, for instance, the main brag is that Billy the Kid once escaped from the local courthouse/jail, gunning down two deputies in the process. Billy was a character in the infamous Lincoln County War between rival merchant-cattlemen in the 1870s.

The state of New Mexico operates seven of Lincoln’s two dozen Billy-era buildings, including the courthouse where park ranger Deann Kessler and I discuss the town’s defining moment. When the telephone rings, she puts the caller off, saying: “I’m in the middle of The Escape. I’ll call you back.”

Billy, still shackled, had gotten a revolver and was aiming for deputy Jim Bell. Apparently, he only missed once. Kessler shows me a bullet hole in a stairwell wall. I look skeptical. Kessler grins. “Well, it’s a legendary bullet hole. Nobody knows if it’s Billy’s.”

When I get to the petroglyphs at 3:30, it’s 87 degrees. John Gerrish doesn’t care. “Look at this,” he says, spreading his arms to embrace the warmth and cloud-free sky and predictability. “You could have a cookout right now. If you wanted to have a cookout four days from now, it’d be the same.”

For the privilege of caretaking the Three Rivers Petroglyph National Recreation Site, Gerrish and his wife get to live there in a fully equipped trailer and diss their native state. “Winters here,” says Gerrish, “are nothing like New Hampshire.”

The second of my five hikes starts just 50 yards from Gerrish’s trailer. It’s an easy walk: three miles up and back, mostly level, starting at 5,000 feet. The trail features wide-angle views, to the east, of the White Mountains, and elsewhere of desert upholstery. In this part of southern New Mexico, anything below 6,000 feet gets toasted brown pretty fast. The trail follows a ridgeline north. Scratched or pecked into the rocks are thousands of drawings left 1,000 years ago by the Mogollon people. Even in midafternoon, the animal figures look spooky, like nightmares caught in stone.

A few hours later, driving south to the air-conditioned Sacramento Mountains, I stop to browse the Civil War-era town of Tularosa and get caught again in mid-photo. Though I’m dangerously near my limit of dried-chili-pepper shots, a bunch hanging by the door of a 115-year-old hacienda begs for attention. I click off a photo just as Shirley Powell walks out.

Powell is proud of her place and invites me inside. First we chat about the weather--”This is one of the driest times I can remember in Tularosa,” says Powell, who, after 44 years here, is an expert witness--then I get a house tour.

She shows me two tiny windows, now filled with stained glass. “Those were the original ‘shooting holes,’ ” she says. “When we first moved in, they were plastered over.” Who were they shooting? “Apaches,” Powell answers.

The next morning, after bivouacking in a parking lot, I find the trailhead is just a 15-minute drive away. Despite the drought, numerous seeps and trickles of water follow the trail, starting with Bluff Springs, where a tiny stream drops over a 30-foot cliff into a marsh of ferns. This eight-mile loop, which goes from 8,200 to 9,300 feet, chugs through tall conifers and stands of aspen whose white-olive trunks end in a filigree of gray branches. Unlike Big Bonito, this is a deep forest trail without desert views.

It’s a cloudless day, in the 70s. The trail is empty. For five hours, I’m spectacularly alone. At first the forest seems quiet. Little by little, I begin to notice the twittering, cawing, chirping and chuck-chucking of hidden birds. When a blue forest jay flitters across the trail, it’s like a piece of sky has fallen through the trees.

That afternoon, in the Cloudcroft ranger station, I wonder out loud if this is really the driest stretch in 30 years. Employee Dorothy Morgan answers briskly, “Ask anybody you want to. We’ve had less than two inches of moisture since October. Now that’s dry.”

In the evening I drive down the mountains to the campground Oliver Lee Memorial State Park. It’s supposed to be dry here--the dunes of White Sands are only 15 miles away--but I find the hillsides bursting with desert life and spring blossoms in full riot.

Oliver Lee has a number of advantages, starting with showers. As the evening sky fills with stars and insect-eating bats, I wash clean for the first time in four days.

It hit the 90s the day before at Oliver Lee, so I start hike No. 4 at sunrise. The Dog Canyon trailhead is right behind the visitor center. Though it begins 4,000 feet lower than the Willie White Trail, Dog Canyon is a tough hike. I plod up steep switchbacks on the canyon’s south wall.

Dog Canyon Trail follows a route used for thousands of years by various native peoples, most recently, Apaches. The Apaches and the white settlers were not pals. They raided each other and killed each other. The park’s visitor center has a list of Dog Canyon Skirmishes, including an incident in 1880 when Apaches heaved boulders down on pursuing companies of the 9th Cavalry. It gives me a new understanding of Shirley Powell’s “shooting holes.”

The early start gives me time to hike, to brunch at Alamogordo, to drive through White Sands National Monument, to slog across the broiling Rio Grande Valley, and still get to the southern edge of the Gila National Forest by 5:30.

My will for camping has been washed away by the shower at Oliver Lee, so I hole up in a motel, just outside Silver City.

*

For my final hike, I drive north the next morning into the national forest on NM-15. After 44 rollercoaster miles, the road drops me off at the visitor center parking lot of the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.

There’s a satisfying Southwestness to the upper reaches of the Gila River. Within a few miles are pine-covered mountains, pinon-juniper plateaus, steep cliffs and clear-running streams. In a narrow canyon that feeds the West Fork of the Gila, are 13th century cliff dwellings as well preserved as the better-known Anasazi sites hundreds of miles north.

After touring the cliff site, I stop by the trailer-office of ranger John Hawkins. As cottonwood tree fuzz floats in through an open door, adding to the white in Hawkins’ hair, we discuss the drought.

Hawkins has talked to some old-timers about it. “They say it’s bad, but I don’t think it’s the worst. Some of them have seen the West Fork dry up.” Good news. When I drove over it an hour before, the West Fork was flowing pretty good.

The Middle Fork is, too. So it’s useless trying to stay dry on hike No. 5. The trail and river entwine like a braid of hair. Anyway, it’s delicious wading through the cool water, which only once reaches my knees.

The Middle Fork Trail begins at the north end of the visitor’s center parking lot and quickly heads to the river. At around mile 1.25, shallow rock-ringed pools capture water from a hot spring.

The trail follows the river more than 30 miles. I amble along it a few hours while Ponderosa pines fill the afternoon with the scent of vanilla and the cottonwood fuzz drifts down like a light snow.

By nightfall, southern New Mexico disappears behind me in the slipstream of 18-wheelers. I’m on an interstate, headed back toward Southern California, where nobody’s worried about weather and lonely hiking trails are endangered.

Some weeks later I call the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque to check on my forests and frontier towns. It’s still dry, says weatherman Kerry Jones, but maybe not the worst in 30 years. He figures a strong summer “monsoon” will wash the drought away.

And if that mushes up the trails, wait till fall. I hear the hiking’s even better when the aspens turn gold.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Ramblin’ Roads

Campgrounds: Westlake Campground (in Lincoln National Forest, 13 miles north of Ruidoso on New Mexico 37, 3 miles west on forest road 107, adjacent to Bonito Lake); 77 sites, RV dump station, toilets, water, no RV hookups, no showers; $8.40 per vehicle per night; telephone (505) 439-4240.

Sleepygrass Campground (in Lincoln National Forest, 1 1/2 miles south of Cloudcroft on New Mexico 130, then 1 mile east on forest road 24B); 45 sites, toilets, water. Showers and RV facilities available to Sleepygrass campers at Silver Campground, 4 miles north of Cloudcroft on New Mexico 244; $6-$7 per vehicle per night; tel. (505) 682-2551.

Oliver Lee Memorial State Park (at base of Sacramento Mountains, 8 miles south of Alamogordo on U.S. 54, 5 miles east on Dog Canyon Road); 44 sites, 17 with RV hookups, RV dumpsite, flush toilets, water, showers; $7 per site per night for tenters, $11 per site per night for RVs; tel. (505) 437-8284.

Upper Scorpion and Lower Scorpion campgrounds (in Gila National Forest, 1 mile west of visitor center at Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument); about 20 sites in upper and lower campgrounds combined, toilets, water, RV dump station, no hookups; free; tel. (505) 536-9461.

Dry conditions have closed some national forest areas this spring, including Westlake Campground. Call before planning a camping trip: Lincoln National Forest, tel. (505) 434-7200; Gila National Forest, tel. (505) 536-9461.

--J.M.