Dinosaur Footprints!

It's Saturday already! Last night we had a great campsite on a cliff overlooking the lake at Clayton Lake State Park in New Mexico. The temperature was cool again and the campground peaceful with only a couple other campers. In the afternoon we took a short hike in the park to see fossilized dinosaur footprints imbedded in the sandstone. We were able to view the footprints from a raised walkway that gives access to a small section of the two-acres where they were discovered in 1982.

Walkway among the dinosaur tracks

Reflections on Clayton Lake

We woke up this morning to a beautiful blue sky and temperatures in the upper 40's, by the afternoon it was in the 70's. After we left the park we passed a couple of small herds of pronghorn antelope grazing on the prairie. They are the fastest animal in the Western Hemisphere and can run up to 70 miles an hour.

We are heading west on Highway 64 which is a route we are following that spans all of the northern most part of New Mexico. It is one of the 120 featured routes in our Reader's Digest book "The Most Scenic Drives in America".

At Capulin Volcano National Monument, we drove to the top of the conical cinder cone which rises 1,300 feet above the plains (8,182 ft above sea level), then hiked the Crater Rim Trail. We went very slowly on the 2 mile drive up Capulin Volcano since the narrow two-lane road cut out of the mountainside had a steep drop off on the outside and a vertical rock wall on the inside. You can see across the plains for miles and miles and the view includes other, more eroded, extinct volcanoes and cinder cones. Mark also hiked the short Crater Vent Trail which descends into the bottom of the crater, the plugged vent of Capulin Volcano. I stayed at the trailhead and took his picture down in the crater.

Capulin Volcano

The plugged vent in the crater

Looking down from the Crater Rim Trail to the parking lot near the top of the volcano and the surrounding countryside far, far below.

View from the top of the volcano.

As we continued west, Hwy 64 winds through Cimarron Canyon State Park. The pretty, narrow canyon is shaded with abundant Blue Spruce and the Cimarron River can be spotted through the trees running along the roadway. We detoured off 64 on 38 and passed through the Red River ski resort on Wheeler Peak, before stopping for the night in the Fawn Lakes campground in the Carson National Forest.

Cimarron Canyon

Pretty horses along the highway.

 

Next stop Taos, New Mexico!

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