Two NPS sites and a bit of driving

Monday, October 14, 2024

Silver City, New Mexico, United States

Today was an adventurous day! We started out at Chiricauha (pronounced "cheer-ee-cow-ah") National Monument in Wilcox, AZ.

Breakfast in Lowell

The chief feature of this park is a massive display of strange rock forms--huge towers that were formed in a volcanic eruption 25 million years ago, and which have then been eroding away ever since, so that we are left with strange and wonderful rock formations. LOTS of pictures.

We took two short-ish hikes--a half mile nature trail and then a mile out-and-back trail to see "the grottoes." After lunch, we headed to the most demanding NPS site of the trip: Fort Bowie National Historic Site, in Bowie, AZ--not far from Chiricauha. The site maintains the ruins of a Fort which stood here in the late 1880s and from which soldiers participated in many battles with the Apache Indians of the area--including Geronimo.

The difficulty of this NPS site is that you have to hike up the hill to get to the visitor center and the ruins, and then back down to your car. Park service info claims the hike is 1.5 miles--it's mostly in open sun and mostly uphill, though mostly gradually uphill. The last 1/3 of a mile or so comes as a bit of a shock, as it suddenly gets very steep.

Lowell has a thing about Flying Saucers

The 1.5-mile description is wrong; the Park Service knows this, as the 1.5 mile marker (markers every quarter-mile) is downhill of the visitor's center something like .2 miles. My Fitbit clocked the hike at 2 miles each way. Very tiring, but we made it and got the passport stamp to prove it!

Oh--and did I mention (no I did not): you have to drive 8 miles on a dirt road to get to the parking area. I don't know whose idea it was to put the visitor's center way up the hill instead of adjacent to parking, but whatever: they have created an NPS site which is not for the faint of heart. Especially after having hiked a couple of miles at altitude that morning.

A word about altitude: it's easy to think of Arizona and New Mexico being lowland flat desert territory; however, we have been over 5000 feet nearly the whole time we've been here--certainly after we left Tuscon. Remember Denver is the "Mile High" city at 5280 feet of elevation.

At any rate: the views throughout this territory are spectacular, and I took loads of photos. Not much in the way of comments, as these are just scenery to admire.

Once we left Fort Bowie, we headed to Silver City, New Mexico, where we will spend the next two nights. Tomorrow we head to Gila Cliff Dwelling National Memorial--reminiscent of several parks we visited the last time we came to the southwest.