Our Favorite Angel Fire Hikes

We are enjoying the cool temperatures of our campground near Angel Fire, New Mexico, this summer. We're getting to know our camping neighbors who have returned to this area for many years because of the summer weather they enjoy here. At over 8,400 feet in elevation, this is one of the highest mountain valleys in the country, and we are enjoying day-time high temperatures in the 70's every day. It's a great place to spend a summer!

We have enjoyed hiking here. So we'll include a few pictures of several hikes we've taken close to Angel Fire.

These pictures were taken on hikes that started at the Elliott Barker trail head just a few miles from our campground. We took two different loop hikes from this starting point.

We love the aspen groves that we have found in the mountains around Angel Fire. We won't be here this fall, but we're guessing this will be a beautifully golden hike in the autumn.

We have noticed cotton floating through the air on these hikes, and we looked in vain to find the cottonwoods that must be shedding their cotton-covered seeds. Then we discovered that aspen also "cotton" at this time of year.

Most of the trees on our hikes are conifers, and we couldn't help but notice some of them are remarkably good at producing pine cones. In some places the wide trail was almost covered.

We are also enjoying the beautiful spring wildflowers that are beginning to show up in the mountains. These mountain sweet peas are certainly sweet to look at.


The mornings are wonderfully cool and bright, so that's a great time to get on the trail.

But almost every afternoon the clouds begin to gather. By this time the temperatures reach the highs for the day--all the way up to the mid-70s.

We have been sprinkled on during those afternoon hikes, and we have watched as the mountains around us were shrouded in rain.

We don't mind the rain, as it makes the flowers grow. The wild pink roses on the trail look fresh with rain drops on their petals.

We're always on the look-out for wildlife while on our hikes. This day we spotted baby chipmunks.

Other days, we have headed out on one of the Angel Fire Greenway hikes. Oesta Vista is the name of a nice loop trail that starts out by the country club. In fact, after we gained some altitude, we could look down on the greens of the golf course.

Oesta Vista is Spanish for "West View," and we are getting the western view of Angel Fire from up on the trail. That includes a birds eye view of Monte Verde Lake where we kayaked, biked, and hiked earlier.

We love the big pine trees that grow up here on the mountain. It makes one feel very small when standing beneath something so big.

Just as we see God's wonder in things so big, we also see them in things tiny. This royal blue beetle is another wonder to us.

We are glad to have good phone service around Angel Fire. In the middle of the hike we made two different reservations for things we will be doing in Colorado next month. Denisa took a picture while Mark was finalizing the dates we will be visiting the Maroon Bells in July.

We were almost all the way around our four-mile loop when Denisa found this fallen log that someone had recently carved into a high-backed chair in the middle of the forest. She was feeling a little like a queen on a throne--until she stood up and found that the tree was still sapping. She had a big glob of sap on her hiking pants! (Here's a full-time RVer hint: Because we have encountered sap before, we know it is tough to get out of clothing. Mark found that a combination of freezing the pants and scraping the excess sap off, then taking the rest out with rubbing alcohol worked great.)

All of those Angel Fire hikes were on well-known trails. But one day we just decided to walk into our little village. What started as a half-mile walk to the post office, turned into a five-mile hike. We stopped in at several stores that we had driven by many times. Then we got the great idea to make this into a loop hike somehow. We ended up on the National Forest's Whoop-De-Do trail a couple miles from town, looking for a way back to our campground.

We had to do some bushwhacking through the national forest, and then ended up trespassing across private property that included the girl scout camp that is vacant this summer. But we still have our sack of purchases from our little trip to town that took most of the day.

On the first day we arrived, we took a hike on one of the Greenway trails on the edge of town. We thought it was fitting that we would finish our month back on the Greenway trails. On our last day in Angel Fire, we walked a loop that started on the bear trail and connected to the elk trail.

We didn't see any bear or elk, but we did see plenty of birds. This robin had just caught a grasshopper.

We don't know the name of this colorful bird, but with that bright orange face and bright yellow chest we couldn't miss seeing him.

Even though it was windy, it was a beautiful blue sky day for our last day's hike.

At the farthest point in the trail from town, we saw a faint trail heading further up the mountain. It wasn't on the greenway map,  but that turn took us to our favorite part of the day.

It was here that we found a couple doe in the shadows,

and this unusual bloom. We are always amazed at God's wonders that we never knew existed!

It was a fun final hike here close to Angel Fire.

Even though some of our hikes around Angel Fire weren't stunning, all of them provided good exercise in a beautifully cool place where we are blessed to be living this month.