Blue Hole

January 8, 2023

Howdy folks,

Well, after a long and frustrating week that included a horse colicking(not fatally), among other things, we made our getaway on Sunday and headed on down the Pecos River to see a few places that we've been wanting to see.  First, we saw Anton Chico, just about 10-15 miles or so downriver from Villanueva State Park(but an hour by car!) and then ended up down in Santa Rosa.  We live at 6200' and dropped down a thousand feet to 5200' at Anton Chico and bottomed out at 4600' in Santa Rosa.  Along the way, we saw where the juniper and pinyon belt that we live in ends(just south of Anton Chico) and saw how it transitioned to a much sparser landscape that still had the conifers, but much smaller and much further apart(if at all, in places).  Cholla, too, grows down that way, but it gets smaller the further south you go.  Ever since we hiked at Villanueva State Park, we've been wondering what the next stretch of river looks like heading downstream.  It's pretty inaccessible from that side past the park, but can be accessed again from Anton Chico and its neighbor, Tecolotito.  After asking some people their opinion of the area and not getting a very positive answer, we still felt compelled to go check it out for ourselves...we actually found it quite charming.  The river really twists and turns(almost back on itself, at times) and is surrounded by little, snaking mesas that have ravines that plunge and tumble off of them on their way down to the river.  After a quick perusal and drive-through, we found a school, a post office, an American Legion, a little store, a bar, a church and assuredly countless other one-person small businesses.  Everyone had animals, big and small.  We keep exploring in every direction from the ranch, always on the lookout for a piece of land to buy so that we can build a house on it someday.  We're not quite at that point yet, but want to make sure that we learn this area like the back of our hand before settling on a place(literally!).  We love the Pecos River Valley and are currently in San Jose.  If you head upriver towards Pecos, less than a half-hour away by car, you find yourself another thousand feet higher; and, now that we've explored Anton Chico, we see that you find yourself another thousand feet lower.  That's a nice range with great air quality and a little bit of moderation against the cold of the higher mountains and the heat further south.  Currently, we're 25 minutes from Las Vegas and 45 minutes from Santa Fe.  A future move to a cute, little spot in Anton Chico would change that to 35 minutes from Las Vegas and 80 minutes from Santa Fe.  We love playing around with the numbers and dreaming big!

So, after that, we continued down US84 until we got to I-40 and then headed east for another twenty miles before getting to Santa Rosa.  We had to go to our bank(which had a branch in town), grabbed a bite to eat at a family-run restaurant(Chico's) and then drove around Santa Rosa, enjoying all of the cute, little houses everywhere.  The town's main attraction is the Blue Hole, which is an eighty-foot deep spring that gushes out of the earth at 3000 gallons per second and has the most Caribbean-like water that you could ever imagine here in the middle of the desert!  Santa Rosa sits in a karst formation, with abundant limestone and gypsum, and the ground has the tendency to erode very easily due to the soluble nature of the rocks.  All over this area are sinkholes that formed over time where the ground deep below had been hollowed out long before and then a sudden subsidence would finish the work, forming a huge hole in the earth for water to well up out of.  This place actually has a scuba center, with diving, and then right next-door are three fishing ponds, which are next to a water park with huge slides...all in the desert!  Or, technically, all on the rough edges of the plains as they slam into the Rockies.  After that, we proceeded ten miles north of town to Santa Rosa Lake State Park and spent a few hours hiking and just pondering the strangeness of seeing a lake nestled on the arid plains.  Actually, this is our favorite river, the Pecos, and this lake was created by its being dammed.  We didn't see another soul there and enjoyed the peace and solitude...and the views!  After that, we got back in the car, headed back home and only stopped briefly where US84 splits off of I-40 to enjoy the hilarity of seeing a herd of cows milling about next to the off-ramp in the DOT's stockpile area and then turned around to gape, open-mouthed, at the sight of Hermit's Peak, just above Las Vegas, some fifty miles away rising up out of the plains, visible all the way down here. 

So, now for the best part of each week's missive, here are some new photos!  First up, seven shots from our exploration of Anton Chico: first, the church at La Loma, one of the little villages outside of Anton Chico; then, looking north from the area(and seeing Starvation Peak); next, looking west from the area(and seeing many, little mesas); then, the view first up and then downstream along the Pecos, just east of Anton Chico; next, a crazy hillside outside of town with TECO spelled out twice on it, a teepee, lots of other things staked in the ground and birds circling everywhere!; and, finally, a shot of the Pecos again, this time looking upstream from Tecolotito.  Next, a series of seven shots from the Blue Hole, starting with a great diagram of it and ending with a selfie that Erin insisted on...notice the random koi, too, I don't know how to account for that!  Then, four shots from our cattle encounter: the first three showing them milling about the pumice and Jersey barriers and the gravel; the last showing the view north from there.  Next, a big series of ten shots from our time at Santa Rosa Lake State Park, including a couple of shots of each other and a rock formation that really looked like a baboon's head!  Lastly, an enormous, beautiful pine tree(of a variety that we don't have up at 6200') that was growing right along the ATM machine in Santa Rosa...we're still investigating what kind it was, but it was amazing!

Take care.