Sitting Bull Falls and Making new Friends

During our second day camping at Brantley Lake State Park, we decided to go on a road trip. It's a slow 38-miles that takes an hour to drive from our campground to our destination inside the National Forest. Most of the drive was through open cattle range.

The yucca were blooming and those open-range cattle are loving it. Denisa's father used to call this "cow candy" because it was a yearly treat for the herd.

Our destination was Sitting Bull Falls, and we parked in the surprisingly large parking lot for this remote location. We are an hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest town in this corner of New Mexico. The picnic tables were shaded with generously spaced rock porticos. This was a great place for our picnic lunch. In the meantime, Denisa noticed that this entire tree was buzzing when she walked by.

That's because the blooms were just beginning to pop open, and the honey bees were hungry for the pollen in this dry desert landscape.

A short hike brought us to our first view of Sitting Bull Falls. We had seen some pretty impressive pictures of it during a wetter season. But today we were lucky to get a trickle of precious water coming over the top of the falls. You can barely see Denisa at the bottom of the waterfall, giving some scale to the size of the waterfall.

Like always, Mark was scrambling up on the rocks around the falls.

That scrambling allowed him to get some different views of Sitting Bull Falls (and Denisa). This view from the top also showed the clear water pool at the bottom of the trickling falls.

We had read about a loop hike that started near the falls, so that was our plan for the day's exercise. It started with a steep hike straight up, and delivered us behind the top of the waterfall. That's where a series of pools collects the water before it spills over the edge.

The pools of the water are surprisingly clear and deep, and we could see all the way to the bottom. In just a short hike we had already wandered God's wonders in this beautiful place.

If you look carefully, you can see Mark standing near the edge of the waterfall with the views of the mountains in front of him.

We even found some pretty little desert flowers at the beginning of this trail.

That's when we should have stopped hiking and headed back down to the pickup. We usually hike in order to see a remote pretty place that is only available to hikers. But the best part of this hike is at the very beginning. The rest of the 5.3-mile loop was a little boring.

Mark managed to wear clothing that matched the landscape. His khaki hiking pants matched the sandstone, and his blue shirt was the same color as the sky. He's like a chameleon today.

The skies were a beautiful blue, and we enjoyed the pleasant spring temperatures in New Mexico.

But we could tell that this was a seldom-used trail. We found lots of trees down on the trail. We also had to make our way through scratchy cat-claw bushes that had grown together and were tearing at our skin and clothes.

It was good exercise, but we wouldn't recommend this 5-mile loop trail. We were both glad to see the parking lot of Sitting Bull Falls below us at the end of the hike.

This was a barren trail with almost no desert flowers. So when we spotted these bright purple blooms at the end of the hike, we had to take a picture.

If we continued on this forest service road, we would eventually get to the very remote Dog Canyon Campground in the northern section of Guadalupe Mountains National Park. But we were ready to head the pickup back to the motor home to our site at Brantley Lake State Park. We enjoyed another beautiful New Mexico sunset. Our neighbor, Michelle, took this picture of the lovely sunset colors surrounding our motor home. We have enjoyed this camping site and their new friendship!

Roger and Michelle are full-time RVers that live in their lovely motor home. We met them a month ago in a Texas State Park, they were at Big Bend National Park the same time that we were, and they also stopped at the BLM campground were we stayed last week. So when we showed up at the same New Mexico state park campground they must have thought we were stalking them. They obviously travel and look for the same kinds of campgrounds that we enjoy. Roger was celebrating a birthday, and they invited us over for a celebratory feast. As we left Brantley Lake State Park, we snapped a picture of our two motor homes together. We have a feeling that we'll see them again down the road! While we like visiting new places like Sitting Bulls Falls, we also enjoy making new friends.