The Search for Aliens in Roswell

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Our week in Alamogordo was coming to an end and even though we had a great time here, we snuck out very early. It's not like we had a long driving day planned. Our destination was Roswell New Mexico only about 130 miles away. The weather forecast had a very windy 36 hours or so coming and driving the rig in strong winds isn't much fun. We had done nearly all of our packing prep work done the night before so there was minimal to do in the morning. We even went as far as to setting the alarm clock! We pulled out just after 7 AM on a very pleasant morning. For the first hour of so of the drive, there didn't seem to be any wind. Maybe the forecasters were wrong? Eventually the wind did start to pick up but not too bad to be a problem. 

Our destination in Roswell was Bottomless Lakes State Park. We had reserved a site about 3 weeks ago to make sure we had a spot. The park is a bit outside of town - about 12 miles east. The park is tall and skinny with a north and south entrance. We should have checked out the map in advance. We took the northern entrance and it was several miles of a narrow twisty road. A pretty drive but not all that enjoyable in the rig. If we return we will come in the southern entrance since Lea Lake Campground is at the southern tip of the park. Since we were getting in well before check-in time (technically before check-out time), we pulled into the empty day use lot and headed over to chat with the camp host. Our spot was open and he had no concerns with us pulling in. 

Our spot was a back-in site and had fairly loose quarter sized pea gravel. The rig didn't settle in too much and we got situated. By mid afternoon the wind had really picked up as predicted. All night long the rig was moving around a bunch. Fortunately the rig was situated to the back end was facing the wind. Had we been perpendicular to the wind it would have been a lot worse. By the next morning it was bad enough that we pulled in our main slide. The slide topper on that slide can really make a lot of racket as the wind gets underneath it and starts to unwind it. When the sound gets too bad, we know its better to just bring the slide in. We got a short walk in around the park but with the wind, we didn't feel like venturing out too far.

A Beautiful Sunset at Bottomless Lakes State Park

The following day was much nicer so into town we went. The first thing I noticed about Roswell is how big the place is. I was expecting a small UFO-centric village. But it has a population of nearly 50,000 people. That's not to say it isn't UFO or alien obsessed. As we went through the main downtown area, nearly all the businesses have a flying saucer or little green man in its window or as part of its sign. The McDonalds has gone all in on the alien theme. Their building has a flying saucer look to it from the outside and the children's play area inside definitely had an alien vibe. We headed to the International UFO Museum and Research Center. It was a very popular place and had a good crowd, but the name of the place seems to be a bit of an overstatement. It's only $5 a piece and is pretty much a MUST do, just don't get your hopes up. 

Roswell's Spaceship McDonalds

The Sign Leaving Roswell on Way to Campground

Entrance to UFO Museum

They do have rooms full of displays, pictures and props. To my knowledge, none of the aliens in the displays were real. It was a hoot to wander around and read about the crash landing of the UFO just a little outside of town and all the sworn affidavits from witnesses and the government's cover up of the whole thing! I'm not positive we lasted much more than an hour in the place. Some of the visitors seemed to be much more into the whole thing and were carefully reading all of the displays. I guess they are true believers. Next we headed down the street and stopped at a couple other shops that specialize in alien souvenirs. One of them, Alien Zone Area 51, has a back room with a dozen or so vignettes of aliens in various situations. For $3 each, we headed in and checked it out. I couldn't talk Chris into posing in each one. I suspect this would be much more entertaining to families with children. 

Take Us to Your Leader

Alien in Stasis

Imaginative Artwork

Alien Autopsy

Chris Makes Friends

Alien Barbeque

The Second Alien Emerges

I'll Have What He's Having

Old Style Alien Keyboard

ET Phone Home

Watching Over Us

After this, we were "aliened" out. We went to a non alien sculpture further up the street. Roswell also happens to be the county seat and has quite a nice county office building. We also managed to get in some geocaching. One of the parks in town has three wherigo caches. These types of caches are often enjoyable. To do them, you must either have a specialized GPSr that can play the wherigo cartridge or use a smartphone and load the cartridge. Wherigos give the cache owner a lot of flexibility on how to setup the adventure. These three had us going back and forth between various "locations" defined by the game as we looked for virtual items - think Pokémon Go. The only problem was this park was the location of the Saturday morning soccer games. There were hundreds of kids and their parents for the games. We felt a little suspicious needing to walk back and forth in front of all the people. At least none of the locations in the game required us to walk out onto the playing fields. 

Roswell Also Has a Cowboy Past

Chaves County Courthouse

We had been warned from others that there isn't a whole lot to do in Roswell. That would have been good advice to heed. Our 6 night stay was overkill for the area. We still had a few days left so we decided to explore Bottomless Lakes State Park more in depth. On the far north side of the park is the Skidmark Trail. It is a mountain bike trail that is just over three miles long. We decide to bike the four miles up to the trail doing some of the geocaches along the way. One of them was quite interesting and fun. It's called Headache. Inside a large container was a hard hat with 31 plastic containers attached. We have done plenty of this type of cache. A large container filled with dozens of smaller containers. Only one of the small containers containers holds the log sheet. All the others have a note that says "sorry keep looking" or something similar. This particular cache was unique in that each of the 31 containers has a log sheet, but the trick is that each one has a title that reads "Use this log if today's day of the month is ##". We ended up finding the proper log sheet for the 15th day of the month after trying 8 or 9 containers. 

Wearing the "Headache" Cache

Pretty Overlook

Lazy Lagoon

We got to the Skidmark trailhead and started around the trail. Even though the trail was rated as intermediate and good for beginners, it didn't take long for us to realize it was a bit more technical than Chris could handle. She had already walked her bike through much of the 1/2 mile we had done and figured the rest of the trail was likely to be the same. She turned back and I continued on. Much of the trail is over exposed rock around a few gullies carved into the rock. I needed to constantly be watching ahead trying to determine what the proper line. It was a challenging but fun trail. It ended up being just over 11 miles by the time I made it back to camp.

Heading Along Skidmark Trail

The next day, we headed up a trail a mile or so back to the visitor center. It was along this trail that we learned about these "bottomless" lakes. The park has 8 lakes with the ninth being on private land just south of the park border. The one by the campground, Lea Lake, has a nice recreation area including a swimming area with a beach. We were here a bit early in the season, so not much activity was going on. The other lakes are much smaller and generally inaccessible but can be viewed. They are called bottomless because when the cowboys in old times tied their ropes together and lowered them into the water, they did not reach the bottom.  Using better technology, today we know the lakes range from 17 to 90 feet deep - far from bottomless but still a catchy name for a park.

Lea Lake

Lea Lake Again

Double Bottomless Lakes

Steep Walls Along this Lake

Looking Across Lea Lake at Our Rig

Overlook of Lea Lake

Our last full day was another extremely windy one. I guess it's true that April can be a very windy month in New Mexico. It kept us inside most of the day but that was okay because this state park actually has very decent free wi-fi. This gave us a chance to do more travel planning for this summer and get some blogs uploaded. Roswell was a stop that we felt obligated to do, but I suspect it won't need a repeat visit.