I headed out early the next morning, since all the campsites at my destination, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, were first-come-first-served (and it was a Friday, too). The roads through the eastern New Mexico plains were nearly empty. I made good time at a conservative 5 mph over the speed limit. The shoulders were littered with the night’s crop of dead jackrabbits, whom the vultures would no doubt devour before evening. I bypassed Roswell around midmorning (seeing nothing weird in the skies, but you never really know...) and stopped for lunch in touristy Carlsbad.
New Mexico has so much character, I thought as I drove through town, with all its adobe buildings and clay-tiled roofs and fiestas and roadrunners and red-or-green chili peppers. It's a land apart from the lawns and shade trees of suburbia, a place that's not afraid to flaunt its differentness. And, what's more, I fit in with the locals; we're all suntanned and at least vaguely Hispanic (unlike, say. Minnesota, where my dark features stuck out like a sore thumb). Call me enchanted.
As I emerged from the built-up part of Carlsbad, I spotted the Guadalupe Ridge on the horizon:
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| Note the drop at the end. |
The long ridge rises up from the desert and follows a gentle curve southwest for nearly a hundred miles, looking for all the world like the spine of some long-dead earth giant.
