New Mexico Road Trip - Socorro to Silver City

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Happy Halloween from New Mexico.  Today is a travel day as we travel from Socorro to Silver City in the southwestern part of New Mexico near the Arizona border.

Our route for the day.  We traveled south from Socorro to Hatch and then backtracked a bit and traveled west to Silver City completing Scenic Byway 23 and part of Scenic Byway 22 on the way.

We got a good start today and were on our way by 9:30.  It was 39 degrees when we left Socorro, but it would warm up as the day went on.  It is only about a three-hour drive to Silver City, so we have plenty of time today.  The first part of our drive will be straight south on I-25. I-25 follows the Rio Grande Valley southward and we could see the Rio Grande River running near the highway during part of the drive.  The first part of the drive was through desolate high desert terrain, but as the Rio Grande River passed near us, we began to see more agriculture.

New Mexico is famous for its chile peppers and Val has been very interested in them.  As we got near our turn off to Silver City, we decided to drive 20 miles further south to Hatch.  Hatch is the premier chile growing area in New Mexico and is called the chile capital of the world.

As we drove through Hatch there were many stores featuring chile products, so we had to stop at a few of them.  One shop was quite interesting as they were roasting peppers in a large tumbler, it was quite an interesting process.  It turns out the customers buy peppers and then can get them roasted.  Val found another small wreath made from the peppers, so we made one more purchase.  They really do look nice and will add to our Christmas decorations this year.

 

Chile Peppers are being roasted in this rotating drum.

 

These are done, fresh roasted Hatch Chile.

One brief note here on the use of the word chile.  The common spelling, at least what I was familiar with, is chili, but we have been seeing it spelled chile here in New Mexico.  When I looked it up to see what the right spelling was it turned out that chili is the English way of spelling it and chile is the Spanish way of spelling it.  Since we are in New Mexico I’m using the Spanish spelling.

After our visit to Hatch, we drove the 20 miles back up I-25 and exited onto Utah Highway 152 and headed west.  The first part of the drive was a pretty desolate and hilly area, but we started to climb and got into a forested area of ponderosa pines at nearly 8500 feet.  The road was full of sharp curves and hairpin turns so pretty slow progress as our speed was limited to around 25 mph.

As we descended back down from the high pass, we drove through the former ghost town of Hillsboro that was the start of Scenic Byway #23.  I’m not sure what a former ghost town means, but there were a lot of empty buildings and not many people.  We passed through another of these “former ghost towns” called Kingston and then we began to see more cars on the road.  We entered the Gila National Forest and there were a lot of campgrounds and trailheads along the way that would attract more people.

Hillsboro

We passed through the town of San Lorenzo and the start of Scenic Byway #22.  We will drive only a portion of this scenic byway as it is a loop that goes up into the mountains that we’ll complete tomorrow.

As we drew nearer to Silver City we really were getting back into civilization.  Silver City wasn’t anything like I expected, I hadn’t exactly expected a small quiet town, but this was a bustling town with quite a bit of traffic.  It is at the crossroads of an important north/south-east/west route, so that ,along with all the recreation options, must draw a lot of people to town.  The population is just a little less than 10,000, but it seemed bigger.  After all the little towns and rural areas we have been in, this seemed quite different.

Entering Silver City

It was a little bigger and busier than I was expecting.

It was almost 3:00 when we arrived and hadn’t had lunch yet, so we searched the Web and found several Mexican restaurants that looked good, but despite the fact they were supposed to be open, they were both closed.  We finally decided on a sandwich shop called A Taste of Vegas and had a good lunch.

After lunch it was time to head to our hotel and get checked in.  By the time we got to our room it was nearly four and we were tired, so we relaxed for a while.  We had some business from home to take care of  and then talked about what to do for dinner.  We had eaten lunch so late we really weren’t very hungry, so we decided to just eat some of the things we carried with us for lunch.

The rest of the evening was spent relaxing and me doing my usual blog update and picture downloading.  I keep saying picture downloading, but I am shooting far more video on this trip than still photos.  Since this is a road trip to do scenic drives, we are spending a lot more time in the car.  I have a magnetic mount for my GoPro that I put on the top of the 4Runner every morning and shoot video as we travel through the scenic areas.  Some days there aren’t many still photos unless we shoot through the car window or stop at a particularly scenic or interesting spot.

We will be spending three days in Silver City and have three scenic drives to do.  Two of them are quite long and over unpaved forest roads so it may be a challenge to get them all completed.  We also have to take some time to do some laundry and that will eat into our time some, but all we can do is try our best to get everything done.  We haven’t quite decided where to go tomorrow, but I think we’ll be heading up to some Gila cliff dwellings.

Scenic Drives Completed: 25 of 35

I didn't count Scenic Byway 22 as we only did part of it today, but we'll finish it tomorrow.

Scenic Drives Missed: 3