d-day minus 1

tonight finds us in northern california 400 miles from home. it. feels. awesome. just knowing that we are going to arrive at a place we can call home in the early afternoon feels so great after a full two weeks on the road. but again moving backwards in time (which i've heard from my most faithful follower, ccr, is what the people want to hear) to southwest new mexico. (on a side note my keyboard finally dried out and my h key is working again, wHicH makes it infinately easier to write).

so we left the cities of new mexico behind in the dust and headed into the wild: the gila national forest and wilderness area. and let me tell you, the name did not lie. we headed due south from albuquerque to truth or consequences, which we at first thought was where we would jump off from into the wild. but we were wrong. while it may look like t or c is on the border of gila on a big map, it turns out in real life it's not even close. so we ended up driving through, slowly though so as to make sure we didn't want to actually stop there, and headed west to silver city, which upon closer reading of the lonely planet guidebook (aka our travel bible) turned out to be our best bet for seeing the forest. getting there however was more difficult than we bargained for, a line on a map may have a slight wiggle, but the road itself was actually 20 miles of switchbacks up and down the mountains, through canyons, and under the unbelievable night sky (with zero light pollution) i saw more stars than i ever though existed around our lonely planet. i thought the roads were amazing fun to drive, but apperently anna noticed that they all seemed to go along the edge of cliffs, and had a much more nervous and white knuckled time of it. it did provide us the oppertunity to pull over at one point to observe the stars of the universe (from the side of the road).

we stayed the night in a fine motel in silver city and ate at a local bad news hosses (which agreed with niether of us, at this point in the trip road food really started to wear on us) and turned in for an early night (and a bit of blogging believe it or not). we rolled out of bed early in the morning and headed up to the gila cliff dwellings, stopping at the ranger station on the way and getting some great advice in addition to an amazing map, which i believe will be the centerpiece of our home decoration as of tomorrow. the roads of the gila are out of this world, and great fun to drive if you're into that sort of thing. but they do take an extremely long time to get anywhere. but it's always beautiful. so after another two hours in (and out) of the car we reached the cliff dwellings (which as it turned out later is a definate misnomer, being more accurately the gila cliff religious and convention center of ancient peoples). we had an amazing hike, talking with a bunch of historical interpreters who were just chock full of random information and anwers to all of our inane and insightful questions. just standing in these caves that have been in use by differing peoples and cultures for thousands of years, with layers of caked on soot from countless fires and cave paintings from who knows when, makes you feel connected to the human race across the ages, except we have the internet, and they didn't. i don't feel up to the task of describing the beauty of the area, so look at the fantastic pictures anna took on her blog. also the accoustics in the third cave were unbelievable. just stepping heavily in that room could be heard on the canyon floor. it sounded amazing. made me really want to hear someone play some music in there.

we left the cliff dwellings proper and wandered around the surrounding countryide, taking in a mostly dry river, more ancient pictographs, and mountain roads galore. by the time we reached silver city we realized it would be near impossible to move on any further that day, so we camped out again in a motel in silver city, making our own dinner for once, and preparing for more outdoor exploration in the morning.

we awoke with the break of day (a first for our trip i am entirely emberrassed to say) and headed out to the mythical hot springs of new mexico. the particular hot springs we were looking for looked quite easy to get to on a map (i just want to say here for any who plan on traveling in the near future in new mexico, don't trust the maps; the distances are perfectly accurate but they do nothing to reflect the difficulty of getting from point a to point b), but turned out to require a hike down to the center of a canyon from the rim. it was another wonderful hike, ending in a river canyon with completely different flora that any of the surrounding area, a man with two quite large dogs, and one river hot spring complete with rock circle and virtual seclusion (although we did run into quite a few people heading down to the hot springs on our way out, good thing we got going early). the hot spring itself was amazing, located on the far side of the river from the trail, and although the water was all of two feet deep, quite amazing to soak in (though i will note that the experience did leave us both covered in river dirt which took literally days to get totally rid of). i realized while we were in new mexico that the term 'river' has nothing to do with any arbitrary size or water flow, but rather to the importance of the waterstream to the local area. what i was calling rivers in new mexico would barely make the grade of creek in pennsylvania. but in a land of no water it looked quite impressive indeed.

we hiked back out of the hotsprings and headed off for our last stop in the gila, the catwalk (as seen in the new york times just weeks before our departure on this trip, thanks nyt) which was a great sight seeing controlled hike through another carved out river canyon that travelled through three distinct climates in the span of a mile. it was once again, breath taking. you know, i'm just going to stop describing the natural wonder and beauty of the gila and simply say everyone i know should go and visit at some point before you die because there is no where else in the world that looks like this. and i'd be willing to go there with any of you.

after our second day in gila it was once again time to move on, this time to arizona, through the petrified forest, and to the great (small) city of flagstaff, and then to see the grand canyon. which will be an adventure for another day.