Thursday, March 3, 2016

Elephant Butt(e) Lake State Park

After staying on some BLM land just outside TorC, we got packed up and hit the road. The plan was to run some errands, then head over to City of Rocks State Park in the afternoon.

The road, and the spot we stayed at, was on the other side of the Rio Grande from TorC, and the river was pretty dry - only a few inches deep in most places. As we were slowly bumping along the road, we saw this truck with a horse trailer ahead of us drive down into the river, through the Rio Grande, and up the other side!

The rest of us weren't so sure about it, but my dad thought it would be cool, and he was driving, so we drove through the Rio Grande, into TorC! It certainly shortened our trip a bit, it was a ways along the undeveloped, one-lane road to the next bridge.

We had a bunch of errands to run - we needed to do some laundry, get some groceries, etc. But first, INTERNET! We stopped by the library for a bit, then over to the laundromat for an hour or two. After that, then we went over to Walmart to get some groceries. By the time we got through all that, it was mid afternoon, so we decided to go over to some BLM land nearby instead of City of Rocks.

We drove a few minutes out of town, then got off the highway onto this little dirt road that led up onto a hill, on what our maps said was BLM land. The view was great, so we unpacked ourselves, put out the awning, opened all the windows, etc. (We even were able to get some pretty fast Internet by cranking up the antenna!). Then, just as we were about to start hanging up our laundry to dry, some guys in a pickup truck drove up and told us that the land ACTUALLY belonged to the golf course below the hill. A little disgruntled, we packed up and drove over to nearby Elephant Butte Lake State Park. We were planning to only stay one night, but when we got there, we discovered that you could park on the beach, right by the lake, and there was good Internet...




We ended up staying for three nights. The lake was beautiful, we were able to take showers, my dad did some work on the taxes, we did a bunch of biking -- it was pretty great!



2 comments:

  1. Here is a tip for you to explore: Take a drive over to Chloride old western town. It's got some very interesting history. We stayed there a week and here's the link to the blog story: http://american-traveler.blogspot.ca/2011/04/march-30-2011-chloride-new-mexico_02.html#comment-form

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  2. Oh, we missed Chloride, it looks neat from the website. We stopped for a couple minutes at Road Forks, and Steins on I10 as we were leaving NM. There is not much so much to see, Chloride looks like a better ghost town example.

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What do you think, where should we go next?