It was 38 degrees when I got up this morning about 7:00, and the sun had been up for a while, so I assume it got a little colder than that last night. As we left the campground, there was a group of 10 deer just down the road.
We drove into Eagle Nest for breakfast, and then headed out through Cimarron to Taos, which took all day. Eagle Nest sits at the base of the mountains and is in a very pretty setting, although most of the businesses in town have not yet opened up for the summer.
Our first stop was a Vietnam Memorial that is on the outskirts of Angel Fire. It was built in 1968 to honor the son of Victor and Jeanne Westphall, who had been killed in Vietnam in May 1968. Also on the grounds was a Huey helicopter that had been active in that war, inserting troops in the Mekong Delta. Thirteen helicopters had gone down before this one was successful.
I heard some geese fly over early this morning before I got out of bed, and we came upon some of them on our drive today. You can tell we are still in New Mexico, no lack of artists here.
As we continued on our drive, we came upon an alpaca ranch with literally hundreds of alpacas. Since we had several next door to us for several years, we weren't too excited about them, but we did get pictures.
We did see one animal on this part of the drive. We thought it was a Mexican Grey Wolf, but at the ranger station we stopped at later we were told it was probably a coyote. But it did not look like our Arizona coyotes. It was in the middle of a field and Joe turned around so we could get a better look, and a picture, but we spooked it and it headed off to the forest. We drove past several forest roads on this drive that were closed, but we finally came upon Forest Road 76 and the gates were open, so we drove back there about 5 miles. We didn't see any wildlife, but we did find a patch of snow, and I hit Joe with a snowball (you can see the snowball in the air if you look closely). Then I bravely crossed the raging river on a log. Quite the athlete!!
We finally made it to Taos about 3:00 and headed over to the Rio Gorge Bridge southwest of town. This gorge is amazing, it's in the middle of nowhere, with no warning that there is this huge canyon. Joe wondered what those early pioneers thought when they came upon this unexpectedly.
The river looks pretty small from the top, but I'm sure it's a lot bigger at the bottom. There were signs saying that rafters come through here, but we didn't see any. They also do hot air balloon rides from here. I called about that but it was $240 each and you had to be at the bridge at 5:30 a.m., so both of those elements made Joe decide it was not doable.
We went back into town and stopped at the Carson Forest Office to get information on quad riding in case we ever get the chance to come back here. Then we went up to the Plaza and walked the shops on the square. We got a recommendation for dinner from one of the shops, so we ate, then headed back to camp. By now, it's 5:30 so we thought we might be in prime time for wildlife viewing. But no luck. We did see one eagle soaring overhead as we neared Eagle Nest. We were hoping to see some elk in the open valleys but no luck there either.
However, when we turned into our campground and went around the loop to get to our campsite, four deer jumped over the fence in the campground. Guess we were looking in the wrong place.
We drove 173 miles in the car today. The weather was beautiful, although there were some thunder clouds over the mountains as we came home. It was in the 70s at the lower elevations, such as Taos, but in the 60s up here at our 8000 feet. We are moving on tomorrow, and our goal is to get out of the state of New Mexico. We've been gone 1 1/2 weeks are have only made it to our neighboring state, so I think we need to pick up the pace a little, or we will miss Shooter's birth in Florida in June!
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