Rock Hound State Park - Deming, NM

After wandering around Texas for almost three months, it is time to retire our tattered Texas Road map and move on to New Mexico to find His wonders in a new state.


So we traveled all of 100 miles down the road and landed close to Deming, Texas at Rock Hound State Park.  We were welcomed by blue skies and fields of gold as we got closer to our destination.

We had meant for this to be a two night stay to catch up on laundry and explore the state park.  But we really like our site here at the foothills of the Florida Mountains.  One reason to stay at Rock Hound State Park is the very nice RV sites that are far apart and pretty level.

They each have a covered picnic table and cooker, and a great view. This is our view of the Florida Mountains from our motorhome.

We're a little confused by changing to a new state.  We moved from Texas to New Mexico by the Florida Mountains.  Sometimes, we don't know where we are.  Most of the time we don't know what day of the week it is, and we have no idea what day of the month it might be.  So we have a calendar on the refrigerator where we write down what we did and where we are.  So when in doubt, we can always check the refrigerator to get our location and date. But wherever we are, we have lucked into more wildflowers in the desert, and Denisa is loving that !

We even lucked into the camp host spot that has full hook ups. It costs an extra $4 per night, but that means that we could wash clothes with reckless abandon.  For the last 9 days in El Paso we were without sewer hookups, so we had to take very short showers and use paper plates.  So it is nice to be able to cook and clean with a more liberal water policy.  

Unlike most state and national parks, Rock Hound allows visitors to pick up rock souvenirs, and take home up to 15 pounds of rocks.  Since we live in a motorhome with weight restrictions, we won't be taking any souvenirs with us.  But the good news is that we seem to have some weight to spare.  We don't have any scales to prove it, but with all this hiking our clothes are getting looser.  Mark's belt is on the tightest hole, and he'll have to punch a new hole to avoid losing his britches on some hike in the future.  No pictures to prove this point, but it seems a good time to sneak in another picture of the beautiful Mexican poppies at our state park home.

Our site is right next to the Botanical Garden trail, and there are some really nice cactus specimens in the park.  This agave looks very healthy, and it is sending up the largest shoot that we have ever seen.  It's almost as big around as our heads!  We would love to stick around to see the magnificent bloom that will come on such a large stalk.

This is a type of "century plant" that grows for many years, then sends up a single bloom bract.  

Here's a picture of another plant that is just starting to form that woody stem that will raise out of the center.

Because of all the energy needed to produce this single bloom, when it finishes blooming the plant itself will die.  Here's another plant that has finished blooming.  The dried stalk is like a tree trunk, and the beautiful agave plant  that produced it will turn brown and die.  Because we have never been around many of these desert plants, we are fascinated by their lives.



And of course we are still great fans of the famous Engelmann cactus.  Here is one in the botanical garden at our state park with its name on the plaque.

And just in case you should think that Denisa is only taking pictures of plants, we'll throw in a lizard.  Because he was posing so well, we have twenty different pictures before Mark convinced Denisa that the only reason the lizard was sitting so still was because he was planning how best to run up her leg.  So she suddenly decided to move on and quit taking pictures.

We don't have any bird pictures, but we do have nest pictures.  It seems that the birds around here don't have any trees to build homes in, so they make do with cacti instead.  We found two different bird nests nestled amongst the spikes of two different cacti.

We are really enjoying our home base here at Rock Hound State Park, and we are finding lots of things to do in this area of southwest New Mexico.