The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless, sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas. You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet; and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000 feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or Grass Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Cañon.
There are several other ways in which the National Forests of New Mexico discount Eastern expectation.
First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back, leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens—There is still a no-tip land. As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast. In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than $2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have your own horse for a six weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2—where will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized, where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel that has been too popular; that day has been long passed in the ranches of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture of the Southwest—conical arches opening from one room into another, shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made for sending in meals.
Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its feathers, which are used in religious rites
The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of most of the Forests by motor, of all of the Forests by team (be sure to hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner. In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible cañons, shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May; but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road, going up the cañon from south to north.
The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the cañons forking off the Pecos at right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.
Lastly, the mountain cañons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to remember—with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation, excellent trails and abundance of game—these National Forests of New Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago, only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the West.
You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests—trees eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval state.