We left the Las Cruces area and moved to Oliver Lee State Park near Alamogordo.
We seemed to have lots of friends stop by for a visit and a bite to eat including this giant hummingbird.
OK I confess. The big black and yellow thing is not a hummingbird. All you birders out there know that it is a Scott’s Oriole. They like sugar water almost as much as hummingbirds. We also had this Loggerhead Shrike that liked to hang around.
We visited Three Rivers Petroglyph National Recreation Site just north of Tularosa. The site is a large group of petroglyphs (21,000 at last count) on a lone volcanic ridge that rises out of the desert.
It was getting hot in Alamogordo so we moved up to the Cloudcroft area to one of our favorite places; a national forest campground in the mountains that is about 9000 feet in elevation. When it is 90 or 95 in Alamogordo, 16 miles away it will be in the mid 70s here.
We think that somehow the word got out that we were coming. We were practically overrun with hummingbirds. These mountains are full of them.
Pat had three of her good friends come up from Dexter for a visit. They went out to lunch and then, of course, just had to do some shopping. It looks as if they had a good time.
We were going on a horseback ride but we thought the equipment might not be up to par so we thought we would find something else to do.
We decided instead to go to Sunspot. Sunspot is a small town and the only thing they do there is astronomy.
This telescope is used to study the sun. There is more of it below ground than above.
This is a view from Sunspot looking northwest. The White Sands National Monument is in the basin below.
We spent a day driving over to Ruidoso. They had opened the road through the big fire area and it was sad to look in some of the valleys and see all the houses that had burned. To cheer us up we went to a sculpture garden of horses.
We have been here several times and will probably go back several more times. It is just a great experience to wander around this sculpture and marvel at how life-like the horses seem to be. Each sculpture is a representation of an actual breed of horse.
How big is each of the horses? I thought you would never ask.
We are just having a great time running around New Mexico where we lived for 30 years before we retired. This is the first time we have been in New Mexico since we retired just to do the tourist thing. We have traveled through on our way to somewhere else and we have stopped in Dexter to visit but we are having so much fun that we will no doubt spend more time here on our Irwin Adventures.
