On To The Santa Fe Trail

On To The Santa Fe Trail

We take our favorite highway out of the Palo Duro area, U.S. Highway 287, that runs from Beaumont, Texas all the way to Great Falls, Montana.  That’s almost to the Canadian border!  We love this drive across the high plains of the Texas Panhandle.  I think it’s “uphill” all the way from Vernon, Texas to the New Mexico border.  It appears to be flat, but at the same time you have a sense of great altitude.

This is the Texas where "the deer and the antelope play."

 

We turn off at Dumas, Texas (I liked this mural painted on the side of one of the downtown buildings),

and head for Texline, hop across the New Mexico border to Clayton and take the southern route into Springer, pick up the Old Santa Fe Trail and move on to Cimarron.  Here are the stomping grounds of names of the Old West like Kit Carson and Annie Oakley.    

From Cimarron we rise into the mountains through the Kit Carson National Forest.  If we’ve been late leaving we usually camp in the forest at Maverick Campgrounds.  Otherwise we rise out of the forest at a plateau called Eagle Nest, New Mexico.  There is a wonderful lake here.  If you’re fans of the old TV show, Jag, you’ve seen this place.  Admiral Chegwidden did some trout fishing here…  Eagle Nest is where several Native American tribal medicine men would gather Eagle feathers for ceremonial purposes.  Charles Springer built a dam creating a 78,000 acre foot lake for irrigation.

 Through Eagle Nest, across the valley floor we pass familiar landmarks like the Loch Ness Monster (our name for it anyway…)   

 

And beautiful log homes, old and new, throughout the valley.

When we reach Junebug campgrounds on the other side of Red River it’s raining.  No worries.  We suspend a tarp from the trees with the help of bungee cords, THEN we put up the tent UNDER the tarp. 

It and we are bone dry!