New Mexico

After my time in Colorado, I spent a single day in New Mexico before heading to Austin, Texas. I left Pagosa Springs early last week Tuesday morning and pointed my wheels south. There had been a hard freeze during the night and Pagosa Springs was glazed in a jagged layer of ice. It made for a beautiful final morning in Colorado.

Once in New Mexico, I stopped first at a sign off the highway marking the Continental Divide and then again in Chama, New Mexico. Chama is a small town that was once a depot on the Cumbres-Toltec narrow-gauge railroad line. Although closed during the winter, in the summer tourists supposedly flock there to ride the still-operational rails. I wandered around Chama's old train station and stopped in the Trinity Cafe for a cup of coffee and breakfast sandwich. Green chili peppers are popular in New Mexico and even come standard on a breakfast sandwich. Keeping with the when-in-Rome mentality, I avoided my impulse to have the peppers on the side and was pleasantly surprised by the kick they added to the ham, egg, and cheese.

An hour or so of driving later, I was in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. Ojo Caliente is famous for its hot springs. There's a resort in the town that goes by the same name. Someone in Pagosa Springs had recommended the Ojo Caliente Hot Springs as a great place to check out and there I was. A day pass could be had for fifteen bucks so I decided to do it even though the lithia hot springs that I was really looking forward to trying was out of service.

Ojo Caliente has five or six major pools, each with different characteristics. My first stop was the 86 degree swimming pool. After a few laps, I took a dip in the arsenic pool. Although fatal when consumed, arsenic is apparently beneficial to skin and heals arthritis and ulcers. My next stop was the soda pool, an enclosed, echoing, steaming structure whose water have been known to aid in relaxation and digestion. 20 minutes later, I checked out the iron pool, a cliffside niche with a pebble floor that benefits the circulatory and immune systems. When I dug my feet into the pebbles of the iron pool I could feel superheated water from the springs deep below bubble up through the displaced rocks.

Even without the lithia spring (which I learned you drink out of as opposed to soaking in) I was totally satisfied with the Ojo Caliente springs. Besides me, its clientele was an odd mix of Europeans and the elderly. Nevertheless, the waters are unmatchable and I really do believe they have some kind of healing and meditative effect.

Santa Fe lies 50 miles south of Ojo Caliente. I arrived there in the early afternoon and first visited a Trader Joe's to stock up on snacks. I found Santa Fe's outskirts to be seedy and boxy, but the downtown of Santa Fe itself is a remarkable place. It's composed entirely of low-lying, adobe structures resulting in an architectural landscape foreign to anything I've seen before. The closest equivalent I could come up with the was Star Wars desert planet of Tatooine.

Downtown, Santa Fe has plazas and galleries and shops and statues (both ancient and modern) and feels like the expensive, artsy place it is. I strolled up and down a few of the mostly empty streets and stopped in a rock store before passing by the Cathedral of St. Francis di Assisi and the San Miguel Mission, the oldest church structure in the United States. The mission is a simple adobe building constructed by the Tlaxcalan Indians under Franciscan Padres in 1610. I spent the night an hour southeast of Santa Fe in Santa Rosa.