Change of Plans!

While exploring the area around Deming, our future plan was to continue north through the state of New Mexico.  We are really enjoying New Mexico!  The cacti are beginning to bloom, and some of the colors are stunning!

But the nice part of living in a home with wheels is that our plans can be changed so easy.  And that's what happened this weekend.

One of the items on our bucket list is to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (and hopefully back out as well).  This is an overnight hike, and there is a very limited number of beds in the lodging available at the bottom.  They take reservations 13 months in advance, and they are always booked up.  But for some reason, we decided to check to make sure there weren't any cancellations that would fit into our plans.  We were shocked to see that they had a cancellation for one man and one woman on April 26, so we booked it immediately.  We will be staying in "the dorms" at Phantom Ranch in the bottom of the Grand Canyon on the night of April 26, and hiking back out of the canyon on April 27.  All this hiking we have been doing should have been great training for the grand hike!

So even though we promised our feet a break from hiking, we convinced them to go on a short hike the next day--strictly for training purposes.  Adjacent to Rock Hound State Park is a smaller day use park just two miles down the road.  You can see Denisa sitting in Rock Hound State Park looking at the mountains of Spring Canyon Park through binoculars.

There is a one mile trail to the top of that mountain called Lover's Leap, so we set off with that as our destination.  We got several comments and texts about the rattlesnake pictures in an earlier post.  We were told that some of the guys wanted more reptiles and fewer flowers in the blog.  So today we bring you lizards from the Lover's Leap trail!

And every once in a while, we are lucky enough to get both lizards and flowers in the same picture.

We were hoping to see some of the ibex that call this park home.  It seems that the country of Iran gave the United States a few long horned ibex sheep as a gift.  That reminds me of the miniature frog that an unnamed aunt and uncle gave our son for Christmas.  But what do you do to keep it alive and thriving once you receive a living gift?  I wished we would have known about Canyon Springs State Park.  Because the small group of ibex have now grown to 300 mountain goat in these craggy mountains in the desert that resemble Iran.  We scanned the mountainside over and over on our hike, but never caught a glimpse of an ibex!  We did see a bunch of ibex poop on the mountain top.  So we must be content to know that we stood where ibex had stood. 

It was a hike with lots of elevation change (in other words it was very steep).  There was also lots of loose rock that meant skating back down part of the mountain on our bottoms.  We have developed a new term for these rolling little boulders that make ascents and descents so perilous.  We now call them "rollders" and we're not great fans of this for a mountainous trail surface.


There was one more lizard siting on the way down the mountain--no flowers required.  But notice the layer of beautiful lichen on the rock.  You will hear us saying "I'm likin' that lichen!" on many of our hikes these days.

 So as we finish our short time in New Mexico and head towards Arizona, we were blessed with a beautiful sunset.  The setting sun turned the mountains behind our site into a cool shade of purple, 

while painting a beautiful sunset across the western sky.

As we say good-bye (for now) to New Mexico--"Land of Enchantment" we are heading toward Arizona--"The Grand Canyon State".  It's Grand Canyon or bust!