Part of what it means to be a travel writer is to go to where there is no there there and find the there that may be there after all. Now this may sound like poetry straight from the mouth of Donald Rumsfeld, but there is wisdom in these words.
I recently took a sojourn into the heart of southern New Mexico to see if there was a there there I could find. Turned out there was gold between those endless acres of sagebrush and motor inns and Applebee’s that dotted the landscape between El Paso, TX, Las Cruces and, yes, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
I found the clearest sky in the country – so clear no commercial airplanes are allowed to fly over it. Only rockets are given clearance here – the ones that launch from Spaceport America with passengers as their payload on a journey into space. Turns out the rocket pad is nearly complete and waiting for Richard Branson to launch SpaceShip 2 with six guests and two crew in a horizontal take-off expected to happen some time in early 2014. (See Space Tourism article in Trave-Intel).
I found the adobe where Billy the Kid was jailed, in a 160-year-old hamlet just outside Las Cruces called Mesilla. It also has an army of ghost activity moving through these adobes that now stand as tony boutiques selling ladies’ clothing and Day of the Dead ornaments. We are warned: “That lady trying to sell you a dress? She may not actually be a lady selling you a dress.”
I found a restaurant (see La Posta) that keeps a piranha in the tank and sells green-hot chili margaritas and another place that sells addictive pecan beer (De La Vega’s Pecan Grill & Brewery) and more than a handful that specialize in a piquant green chili stew.
There’s a Saturday farmers’ market in downtown Las Cruces sells earrings made out of bullets, toys made of tin cans, home remedies for restless leg syndrome, bandanas for dogs, hot chili peanut brittle and a cartoon paintings of favorite saints.
And then there is a museum dedicated to America’s favorite missiles has a home just outside the White Sands Missile Range. It’s possible to wander the yard of White Sands Missile Range Museum and where some 50 rockets and missiles have their final resting place and come face to face with a huge Redstone, the entire Nike family of missiles and even a restored V-2. Meanwhile, the earth continues to rumble all around you as the sky fills with contrails. You won’t know what is being tested; you’ll only read about it on the description plaque 20 years from now.
But not far from the Missile Range is While Sands National Monument, 275 square miles of desert and the largest gypsum field in the world. The gypsum sand moves in high dunes at a rate of 30 feet a year, but solid and packed and white pure as a desert can be under an endless sky.
I return to town with time to check out a free exhibit in the Branigan Gallery of Art, running at this time a celebrated collection of paintings by known Hispanic artists who have stories to tell. Across the courtyard a cultural center puts perspective on the place with a photo gallery of history, from the Civil War (Confederates conquered this territory but the Union Army busted the southern supply lines and brought the army to their knees – who knew?), to its purchase from Mexico, to farming and ranching settlements by the Rio Grande to WWII when weapons testing suddenly put Las Cruces on the map.
Finally, and not surprisingly, I found a museum of sorts dedicated to the petite and powerful chili pepper. Las Cruces is known for its chilies as much as it is known for its pecan groves. The Chili Institute at the University of New Mexico has made a science of the chili pepper measuring burns of more than 150 varietals in “SHUs” (Scoville Heat Units, a scale measuring the spicy fire of chile peppers). A large demo garden tells the whole tale of the capsicum family – from the mildest green bud to the fiery habanero, followed by a tour of the gift shop where you can buy recipe books, pepper spray, chili art and hot, not-for-sissies brownie mix.
Read more about Las Cruces in Travel-Intel
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Photos by Lark Ellen Gould