Exploring Southwest New Mexico: Silver City, Gila Cliff Dwellings, & Catwalk Recreation Area!

In our last video we kicked off our big journey to Alaska and made the very long drive out of Texas stopping at a bunch of fun sites along the way. This is amazing! For our next stop on our road trip we are in southwestern New Mexico. We visited New Mexico a handful of times since moving into the van but this is a new area for us so we are very excited to check it out and first up we're in Silver City. So the history of the area around Silver City goes back many years with the Apache Indians calling this area home for centuries along with the Mogollon who will tell you more about tomorrow. The Native Americans mined for turquoise and as Spanish and other settlers moved into the area they mined for copper and gold before silver ore deposits were discovered and that led to the founding of Silver City in the 1870s. This brought a wave of prospectors as well as a railroad and it became a pretty wild place. Many well-known wild west outlaws used to frequent the town including Billy the Kid who lived here in Butch Cassidy's Wild Munch. The town is definitely not as crazy today and is home to Western New Mexico University, a historic downtown, copper mining and tons of outdoor adventures nearby. It is so cold out this morning and our fingers are numb so we popped into a coffee shop called Tranquil Buzz just to get some Americanos and just to see this place. This place is one of the most unique and eclectic coffee shops we've ever been to and ever since I saw photos of it online I was like we have to come here. There's all this wood and brick everywhere, all the signage, little knickknacks all over the walls and on the shelves. The floors even have like paintings and murals. There's just so much to see here. I think you could spend hours just trying to look at every little detail in this place. It is so cool. They also serve one of our favorite coffee roasters, Picacho Roasters out of Las Cruces, New Mexico. It's just as delicious as I remember. Something we forgot to mention about Silver City is how many art galleries and murals there are all around town. You'll see these red circular signs on the sidewalks and on buildings that say art and that tells you that there's art to check out there and we're standing outside of a place called A Space and we just met a local at the coffee shop and she said this is a really cool place to check out. She kind of compared it to a Meow Wolf and unfortunately they're closed today so we can't go inside but even the outside itself is cool but if you're here on a day they're open she says it's a really awesome experience. Silver City's original main street was located right here where Big Ditch Park is located today in 1895. A large flood of four to eight feet of water ripped through this area destroying most of the buildings and leaving this ditch 55 feet below the original street level. For years this area was used for trash and sewage and in the 1970s they planned on filling it in and paving over it for a parking lot but the citizens banded together cleaned it up and turned it into Big Ditch Park. For lunch we came to a spot called Corner Kitchen which is a small spot that serves breakfast and lunch every day and their menu changes every day and so you can check on Facebook to see what they're going to be serving that day and I got because it's a very cool day I forgot what it was for a second it's a butternut squash poblano soup and it looks really really good and I got the Guinness beef stew with smashed red potatoes oh yeah this is gonna be so good on a warm cold day like today look at that that is so hearty so beefy potatoey you got carrots in here there's a little bit of onion there's even some mushrooms one of my favorites and the meat is so tender oh this feels so good on a cold day like today I know I already said that but it is just it's just perfect this soup is nice and thick it's a thick soup oh I can feel a little bit of heat from the chilies but it has like a kind of a almost like a sweet spicy just warm oh perfect this is awesome soup I'm gonna just after eating it for a little bit I can definitely taste kind of a unique flavor in the sauce or the stew here from the Guinness and also they give you a slice of bread here it's kind of mangled up now but it's the perfect vessel to sop up all that sauce and this bread is just so dang good it's so fluffy and the outside is is it pillowy crispy oh you bet your bottom dollar this is some pillowy bread I helped them out they almost don't even have to wash this dish the number one thing we wanted to do while here in this area is visit the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument which is only about 44 miles north of Silver City but it's up in the mountains and it takes about an hour and a half to two hours to drive to the National Monument has set hours that it's open so by the time we could get there today it would be closed for the day but we're driving up there so we can camp really close by and explore it tomorrow so there's two ways you can get to the Gila Cliff Dwellings you can take 15 north which basically leads directly from Silver City or you can go east through the Membres Valley go up 35 that connects to 15 we talked to a local earlier today and he said that's the way he likes to go so we're gonna follow his advice there is a dog leading goats this is the cutest thing I've ever seen in my life that was a crazy beautiful drive also crazy steep but we made it to our free campground for the night the grapevine campground this campground is awesome because there is a river running right behind our campsite here we are definitely living in a van down by the river but this campground is in the Gila National Forest which is just on the edge of the Gila Wilderness which fun fact was the first designated wilderness area in the world it was established in 1924 when Aldo Leopold a Forest Service employee working in New Mexico initiated the federal wilderness concept he later became a leader in wildlife management and wilderness conservation we've got about a 10-minute drive to the Cliff Dwellings which we'll be exploring tomorrow the Gila Cliff Dwellings were the home of the mugion for only a short period of time from the late 1200s to the early 1300s researchers don't know why they abandoned these dwellings but today you can view their remains in five alcoves where they lived it's the only unit managed by the National Park Service that contains mugion sites which are rapidly disappearing around the southwest and one super cool thing about this place is that you actually get to explore it on your own there's a one mile loop trail that'll take you to the Cliff Dwellings and we hear that there'll be a park ranger in the dwellings to give us more information we made it we read that the wooden beams here are the original beams and over 40 percent of the walls have the original plaster that was there so it's estimated that about 40 to 60 mugions lived here in the dwellings there were 40 rooms total you can see all the soot on the ceiling and there's even some pictographs there's a pictograph of a man and then one of a snake and apparently as we continue down the trail we'll see more of them too it is so crazy to me that they let you explore the Cliff Dwellings on your own obviously there's certain rules like don't touch the walls don't sit on things don't go into restricted areas so please be respectful i felt like indiana jones walking through there it's just such a neat experience getting to walk through those ruins it kind of gives you a connection to the past it was just so much fun and like we mentioned before there's a ranger station there that you can ask all the questions you want she was very knowledgeable and super informative so it's kind of like a smaller scale version of Mesa Verde which we did mostly enjoy but what was cool about this one is you get to enjoy it at your own pace instead of going on a guided tour but you still get that ranger experience by having a ranger in there so it's kind of like the best of both worlds and bonus no one hit our bumper so i think i like it better than Mesa Verde just a few miles from the Cliff Dwellings is a very cool spot called Doc Campbell's and we heard it was a must visit when driving back towards town it's basically this giant general store they have everything you could really ever need they have beanies blankets they have backpacking meals they have hiking supplies they have regular snacks this area is actually along the cdt so they get a lot of through hikers that come to Doc Campbell's to take showers get their resupply boxes and to load up on different supplies and one thing that they have that we we got coffee and blueberry i mean butterscotch it might be 40 something degrees outside but you know you know that doesn't stop us from eating ice cream one of the ladies inside said that coffee was her favorite flavor and she did not steer us wrong oh man creamy coffee adam's new way to describe food is to just list the ingredients and add e to the end so beefy potatoey carroty coffee i was scared they weren't going to have ice cream since it's the winter so i was very glad to see that they also clearly abide by the rule that it's never not ice cream weather is it butterscotchy it's butterscotchy that's so good also fun fact about this place it's named after the first seasonal park ranger at Gila Cliff Dwellings Dawson Doc Campbell all right we're back on the road and we have one more spot we want to check out while here in southwest new mexico which we're going to check out tomorrow because to get there we have to drive all the way back down to silver city and then around a bit it's about a three hour drive so for tonight we're going to go drive to a campground nearby that some would say is out of this world welcome to the cosmic campground it's celestial it's interstellar it's astronomical this is a free campground that was actually the first international dark sky sanctuary in north america they have four concrete pads over there where you can set up your telescope or your tripod i read that it's not the best time of year to be able to see the milky way it's also going to be a full moon tonight so if we don't fall asleep before it gets dark tonight we're going to come out here and try to get some photos of the night sky all right we've had dinner we facetimed with our friends jen and elliot for a few hours and we're still awake barely but we're still awake we're going to attempt to go get some photos very quickly because we want to go to bed you can see so many stars and despite what we said earlier i'm pretty sure we can see the milky way or at least we're capturing something that kind of looks like the milky way it is unreal we think we got a couple good photos and if any of them turned out we'll put them on the screen right now all right now it's time for bed we'll see you in the morning our last stop in new mexico is the catwalk recreation area this area's history began with the discovery of gold and silver in the mountains above whitewater canyon there was a steel pipeline that would bring water to the ore processing mill in the town right here where the current parking lot is you can see some of the remains behind me just on the hill there there was a plank board walkway on top of this pipe most of the pipe is gone now but today there is a catwalk trail that the public can follow that follows the same route so in the 1930s the ccc rebuilt the catwalk to be a tourist attraction and then in the 1960s the forest service rebuilt it again to what you see here today and some of the supports for the catwalk are the same brace supports they used for the steel pipeline this is way cooler than i thought it would be and what's especially cool is that you can still see evidence of the past there's a these metal rungs still attached to the rock face you can see some wires hanging down some wood still attached so it's really neat to be able to see like the new experience as well as what the old experience could have been like too and to top off the whole experience not only did we have this whole place completely to ourselves it is now very very lightly snowing which is adding just a little magical touch we hadn't heard much about this area of new mexico before our visit but we loved it it feels like such an underrated gem there's so much history to learn here so much beautiful nature to explore and we have to say the locals around here are the most friendly people we've ever encountered on the road we lost count of how many people said hi to us waved at us actually stopped and had long conversations with us recommendations stuff to do it just the whole our whole time here has just been such an awesome surprise but for now we have an astronomical amount of work to do so we are going to head back to the cosmic campground but next up you'll find us in arizona there's two ways you can get to the hila quip quiff dwelling the hila quip hila quiff dwellings it's so hard to say starting to work out i'm doing now to be able to hold this camera better as i'm holding a weight like 10 seconds at a time just out trying to practice being able to hold the super heavy camera setup it was i was it was like riding a bull