Wednesday, July 8th
Shortly after getting back on the interstate and heading west from Amarillo, I caught a glimpse of the Cadillac Ranch on the left. Having just gotten started for the day, I hated to interrupt our progress by turning around to go visit it, so we just rolled on westward.
We made it to NM just after 10 am!
After spending a few minutes at the visitor’s center at the state line, we pushed on to Albuquerque. My friend Jeff had given me a suggested route that took us around the city and up through northern NM. We were already in triage mode with our goals for the trip due to our time being limited. Reasoning that interstates were faster, we chose to continue on I-40 into the city and then take I-25 northward to Bernalillo before striking out into more remote regions.
We hit Albuquerque during lunch hour, so the traffic was horrendous. Brian is from Boone and doesn’t get to ride in big-city traffic. It made him quite nervous. The roasting dry heat was bad enough to deal with, but dealing with crazy drivers on their lunch hour rush was nuts. Somehow we made it through to Hwy 550 and headed northwest out of the insanity.
As we headed up Hwy 550, we passed by Zia Pueblo, home of the “zia” sun symbol. This symbol is part of the New Mexico state flag and was a significant influence on the Adventure Family symbol.
Route 4 towards Jemez Springs was fun to ride – curvy and scenic. It too would have been more enjoyable if we hadn’t been worried about the tires melting off the bikes, or our brains baking in our helmets. Being there during the heat of the day, in July, was probably the worst time to visit. But that’s when we had our kitchen passes, so we dealt with it.
One of Jeff’s recommended points of interest was Fenton Lake State Park. We headed here for some relief from the heat. The lake was at a higher elevation and a little cooler. We opted to skip a dip in the lake and headed on along Route 4.
Not too far away was Jemez Falls. We headed there with the idea that we could do a little hiking. Brian was thinking there was a 2-3 mile trail leading to the falls. We arrived at a Forest Service sign for the falls. We headed down the paved road. About 3 miles later we arrived at a parking lot and discovered the hike was only 1/4 mile. Oh well, we’ll take that after all of our saddle time. We joined the other tourists huffing and puffing down to the falls.
I did wade into the creek to take a picture of the upper falls.
From there we continued along Route 4 to the Redondo Peak area. The road ran along the edge of the Valles Caldera National Preserve. The wide-open grass valley was gorgeous.
From there we headed east into Los Alamos. This city/facility can be shut down due to the sensitive nature of the work done there, so we passed through some armed checkpoints and gates. I think there’s an additional protection factor built in with the design of the road system – the roads were snaky and a wrong turn ended up taking us where we wanted to go anyway. Very confusing.
We eventually made it through the town and stopped in Espanola for gas. This town is down in a valley where the temps were back up in the 90s. From here we headed north on US 84, with plans to find a USFS campground for the night.
An hour later, we had climbed back into the mountains and were seeing some signs for the Carson National Forest. We found the ranger station, which was closed by then, but there were brochures outside that gave us enough info to work with. We headed up a long unpaved road into the mountains in search of the Canjillon Creek campground. By this time the day was drawing to a close. The air was getting much cooler as we gained more altitude. The sun was setting. The gravel road ran on and on. We almost stopped at a cattle corral and camped, but decided to push on to the campground.
After having to run a herd of cows out of the road, we reached an intersection with a sign that said “Campground 1 mile”. Sheesh. We had had just about enough at this point and the field beside the intersection was open and flat enough to make a decent camp for us, so we called an end to our riding for the day. We pitched our tents right there, cooked some dinner, and collapsed in the tent as the full moon came up.
During the night, I’m pretty sure I heard coyotes howling. This was the first night on the trip where we were far, far away from a highway so there were no highway noises to drone us to sleep. We slept great!
| Mileage | |
| Today | 506.4 |
| Trip Total | 2,109.6 |
