Fun New Mexico fact: It snows here!

Many people mistakenly think New Mexico is warm like, say, Arizona or Texas. This leads to many panicked purchases of coats and boots upon arrival in Albuquerque. The sun does shine nearly every day, but hell yeah, man–it snows here!

Which was precisely my fear when I first arrived. Snow can fall in huge blizzards anytime up until May, and that can put a serious cramp in my carefully timed research trips. Four years ago around this time, I got caught in a tremendously awful blizzard that shut down all the interstates, and I caught a tremendously awful cold while waiting out the storm at a friend’s house.

So for this trip, I concentrated on southern New Mexico. The Chihuahuan desert spreads over a lot of the southern part of the state, and there are fewer mountains–which still means it can snow, but the risk is a lot less.

For most of the trip, I toodled around the desert lands and the open plains of “west west Texas” (as eastern NM is sometimes known). I also headed west, and popped into Silver City, tucked up in the mountains, just after the snow had melted from the worst storm they’d gotten in like 80 years.

Normally, I think of the flatter parts of southern New Mexico as a little bleak and short on scenery. But in the middle of winter, the relative warmth is welcome, and the scenery was beautiful this time of year. Tiny spots of green were just showing up, and the winter had been so wet that the earth was darker, giving a sharper contrast to all the gold-blond scrubby plains that look so monotonous in summer.

I spent one long day driving from Silver City to Roswell (304 miles, when you take the direct route–which I did not). It was like watching an eight-hour film, with the clouds scudding overhead and the vistas opening up at each mountain pass. Near the end of the day, there was a stubby rainbow, and then the clouds turned bright pink and loomed up on the horizon like the biggest cake in the world. After the sun set, lightning crackled all along the horizon.

I’m running a contest all this week, for free copies of a Santa Fe guidebook–enter here.