Day 27: Snow, Silver City and Sink Pile Up in New Mexico

Lisette first heard the term “wind chill factor” when she first visited the US as a 13 year-old, spending winter with family on the East Coast and being stuck indoors due to the icy blizzards. Before that, growing up in Sydney she’d only heard of one temperature to describe the current state, rather than a temperature for what it should be without the wind! 

With the wind rattling all night–and snowfall occurring not far from where we were, it was icy cold when Lisette took Sheila outside for a brief walk first thing in the morning. You know when your fingers get so cold that they hurt? That’s how icy it felt this morning. 

Once we left our campsite, we drove on to Silver City, a town known for its mining and outlaw history, with Silver City’s sheriff the first to arrest the infamous Billy the Kid. We’d read positive reviews about the Western New Mexico University Museum, which showcases Native American and Southwestern pottery, artifacts and crafts, but unfortunately once we got there we found out it was closed for spring break.

Bataan Memorial 

So we continued on to Bataan Memorial Park, which is in the nearby town of Santa Clara. During World War II, there was a death march of 75,000 prisoners of war in the province of Bataan, Philippines, at the hands of the Japanese military. If they weren’t murdered by Japanese soldiers, thousands of Filipino and American prisoners died of thirst and exhaustion, with estimates of between 5,000 to 18,000 deaths. The Memorial had significance to Lisette, as her family is from Bataan, and her paternal grandfather, who fought in the war, was captured and was in the death march, but was only able to escape because the march went through his hometown. We learned that many of the American soldiers on the march were from New Mexico, so it’s one of the most remembered events of WWII in the state. 

Dragonfly Petroglyphs

In the same park there’s also a memorial for the Vietnam War, which we looked at briefly but by this stage it was also freezing with the icy wind, so we ran back to our RV and went to Dragonfly Loop Trail, which is part of Gila National Forest. The trail is an easy 3.2 kilometers (2 miles), with petroglyphs–ancient rock art–the main highlight of this trail. Because it was so cold, we unsurprisingly were the only ones on the trail, but it was also nice and peaceful to have the scenic hike to ourselves, and see the petroglyphs of dragonflies, lizards, and other art. 

Side note: do you know the difference between a petroglyph and a pictograph? We didn’t but had encountered both already on this trip. Petroglyphs are rock carvings made by scratching or pecking into stone surfaces, while pictographs are paintings or drawings on rock surfaces using pigments.

Because it was already late afternoon by the time we finished our hike, we had to skip seeing more of Gila National Forest (which has canyons, cave dwellings, etc), making our way to the city of Las Cruces, which is a city in New Mexico on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert. We parked at a rest stop by the rather realistic-looking Recycled Roadrunner Sculpture, which is made of landfill materials including old phones, bike parts, and other materials (we even saw the Samsung brand prominently displayed). The rest stop was incredibly popular for cars, RVs and trucks, so it was a little loud with the strong icy wind also playing a part, but there’s also toilets and security there, and it was good to have a designated place to stop for the night. 

Our final fun for the evening? Our water pump suddenly stopped working, and after some sleuthing, Michael figured out that it was because the fuse blew, likely due to the new water pump we’d just replaced being stronger than the one prior. With dirty dishes piled in the sink, we went to bed planning to go back to the nearby Love’s Travel Stop to get a replacement for this and our propane.

Route Map