ADAM HAYDOCK

It was nice to get back to the Gila Wilderness to spend more time hiking around but the nights were quite cold as the temp drops into the 20s and our sleeping bags did not do much for protection aganist the elements that we were facing. We woke up the following day and got to the trial head which started off as a desert and turned into more of a pine landscape feature.  

This turned into a wash that morphed into a canyon full of trees and by mid day we were at the gild river.  We looked upon these hoodoo spires which was fascinating to see but we wanted to make sure that we got back to the car in time so we started our hike back by following the river until we made it to a valley field area.  We had to cross thick vegetation and cross over 12 stream crossings before we made it to this valley.

In the cliffs above us we could see cliff dwellings and I was able to climb up to one of them to peak inside to see where the Indians use to live as the ceilings were caked with smoke from 1000's of years ago.  There was a natural hot spring coming out of the ground with super hot water but we were able to take some of the water from the river and mix it in which made this hot spring more like a bath tub of nice water to soak into. It was really nice and there were more of these hot springs randomly near the river. 

After a few days of hiking around we went to the city of rocks which are a bunch of rocks that have been here for over 350,000,000 years.  It is intereting to see because these are 1-2 story rocks that you can almost jump to from one another and they are in the middle of this grassy plain.

 The next day we headed over to the burro mountains which was not much of anything than we headed over to the White Sands and stayed at oliver lee stat park.  This was a rather nice place which had a nice over look of a straight road that stretched for 20 plus miles into the desert.   The following day we hiked up to some old houses in the mountain and we decided to come down grab some lunch and head over to see petroglyphs and camps at the valley of fire in new mexico.

 The Valley Of fire is a place where a Volcano erupted 10,000 years ago and spewed lava across the plains.  It was really interesting to see how the flor and fauna have adapted to this dark and very sharp glassy like habitat but life does continue to exist and the cavernous lava flow was really interesting to see after a field of desert that we witnessed.