TRAVEL DAY
From: City of Rocks State Park, Faywood, NM.
To:Rusty’s RV Ranch, Rodeo, NM.
Day 90 – It was 32 degrees this morning when we got up, and cloudy. We wanted to get out as early as we could for the trip to our next destination. Since they had no dump station at City of Rocks, we were almost out of propane in the portable propane tank, and we ran out of bread and hadn’t baked a new loaf, we had several stops to make in addition to the drive to Rusty’s RV Ranch near Rodeo, NM.
The girls were so settled in this morning, we really hated to make them leave. There was some complaining when we moved them into the bedroom, their traveling space. We departed City of Rocks at 9:45 a.m.
We stopped first in Deming before getting on I-10 heading west. They didn’t have a propane filling station, but we were able to fill the RV gas tank and dump our other tanks in lieu of a campground dump station. We also stopped at a Subway and got lunch. We do need to bake a loaf of bread ASAP. Later, we continued our search for a propane filling station in Lordsburg; we tried two places but were unsuccessful.
The journey from one campground to the other was uneventful. We took I-10 most of the way, and some portions of it were not in very good shape; the girls let us know how dissatisfied they were. We crossed the Continental Divide. The first part of the trip was mostly flat and desert-like, certainly fairly remote, and plenty of tumbleweeds lined the pavement on both sides of the road. We figured that since we were in extreme south western NM, we were finished with the mountains we’d been camping around. We were mistaken.
As we continued on, mountains appeared in the distance and we could see snow topping a group of them. We turned south on the narrow NM Rte-80 and began to gradually climb towards those mountains. There were no towns and very few vehicles for many miles – quite remote. We wondered if the mountains we were approaching, the ones with the snow on them, were part of the Coronado National Forest complex, the Chiricahua Mountains, and the location of the Chiricahua National Monument.
The reason we were making this stop at Rusty’s RV Ranch, a private campground in the middle of nowhere, was to use it as a base for a scouting trip of the Coronado National Forest campgrounds. We’d wanted to visit this area, but saw online that many of the region’s campgrounds were closed and/or the roads were impassible for a vehicle the size of ours. We wanted to camp outside the Forest complex for a few nights to enable us to drive into the area in the Honda to scope out the possibilities.
We arrived at Rusty’s at 12:35 p.m. (not bad after all the stops we made along the way). It was 59 degrees, windy and cloudy. We had reservations for 2 nights in a site without hook-ups. The campsites with hook-ups were already taken. The campground had potable water and a dump station; we really didn’t need the hook-ups otherwise. We asked the campground host where we could get propane. He said the closest propane would be over 50 miles away. Something else to scope out.
After checking in, we filled our water tank with fresh water and drove to our site. Many of the campers appeared to be full-timers or seasonals; there were probably not lots of transient campers. People appeared to be REALLY settled in, like the couple we saw who were wearing bathrobes while walking their dog. Now, that was different! After having lunch and unpacking, while Rob was hooking up the RV propane tank and turning on the water, the girls were waiting for him at the RV’s door, as usual. This is one of my favorite sights. They just LOVE their papa. (Pixie was busy wreaking havoc on the dashboard.)
This afternoon, we decided to scope out campgrounds closest to us in the western part of the National Forest. We took a paved road into the Forest. It was beautiful scenery. The further we went on the road, the better the scenery got. Towering rock formations and cliffs surrounded us on all sides. A creek ran along the side of the road – not much water in it this time of year, but you could see from the boulders and the sides of the creek bed that it must be a raging river after the winter. We came across several small forest service campgrounds. Two were closed for the winter; one of them, Idlewild Campground appeared to have sites right at the base of the rock formations – hard to tell for sure since it was closed, though. Two other campgrounds were open and we drove thru, writing down the numbers of the sites that could accommodate our RV. The first, Stewart Campground, only had five campsites, dry camping with no hook-ups, and water was only available at another campground, Sunny Flat. Sunny Flat Campground had 12 campsites, and two of the sites were really nice – private and with incredible surroundings. The other sites were either occupied or too small for us. This campground also had no hook-ups, but they did offer fresh water. We picked up fee payment envelopes in case we decided after scoping everything out, that we would camp at Sunny Flat.
We drove on until the paved road ended. This area was called the Cave Creek Canyon Recreation Area. The scenery kept getting better and better. We decided to see how bad the dirt road would get. It was overcast, so the scenery colors weren’t as brilliant as they would’ve been with full sun. We still took pictures, and hope to come back when there is more sunlight. We drove until we were afraid we might not be able to go much farther; the snow on top of the taller mountains was melting and there were muddy, and potentially icy, areas on the narrow road. When a truck was coming down the road in the opposite direction, the two vehicles barely fit. We turned around and headed back to the paved road. We did see several campers pulled off the road, boondocking, not in a campground. That looked nice, too, but we wouldn’t take the RV on a dirt road like this one.
It was getting dark when we got back to the RV. Rob grabbed a picture of the sunset behind the RV. We had dinner (fish curry over brown rice). We had no idea the Coronado National Forest’s Chiricahua Mountains were so magnificent! Today’s drive was just the tip of the iceberg.
