Hello Emily!  Emily is our friend from Kansas! She also blogs under the url:http://followingthewinds.blogspot.com/

Emily solos in her 16' Casita! We met her at Birdwatchers Campground in San Antonio NM. After setting up campers, we headed out to Socorro to eat pizza. Stuffed and sleepy, we went to bed early with the anticipation of visiting Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in the morning! Vee's of Sand Hill cranes were in the air, flying to the refuge and we were excited!

Here is Em standing next to 2 bronze sandhill cranes.

Below is the link to Bosque del Apache.

http://www.friendsofthebosque.org/

Nov 17th and 18th, Chuck and I will be going back for the Festival of the Cranes!  Thousands of Sand Hill Cranes come to the refuge every year! It is quite breath taking!

                   Chuck and I strike a pose!

Snow Geese against an Autumn landscape!

The Autumn colors are amazing! Cottonwoods are turning gold while various reds and bronzes add to the overall beauty!

At dusk, just as we are about to leave, we see our first cranes! Chuck and I are going back for more hopefully before the festival!

This is why we are called The MotherShip! Many of our friends have smaller Casita or Oliver travel trailers! They are like the satellites to our MotherShip! This is Emily's Casita she calls "Eggie" parked next to us!

Emily, Chuck and Sue in front of the old saloon in Chloride NM, our favorite ghost town!

http://www.pioneerstoremuseum.com/

http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/chloride.html

Sue also travels solo in her Casita! That is Sue with her "crew" of rat terriers Spike and Bridget. This is the first time Emily and Sue have met in person! They have been reading each other's blog for some time. Sue's blog is here:

http://rvsueandcrew.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/keeping-it-real-along-the-rio-grande/#comments

Emily and Sue photographing the Doodle Dum house in Chloride NM!

Ok, I had to get a picture of it too! This is where Cassie Hobbs made her furniture and all of her wonderful crafts! Cassie is gone, but her art lives on in the general store!

Below is Donna Edmund. She and her husband, Don, have lived in Chloride 32 years, slowly restoring some of the buildings there. This is the old style cash register found in the "general store" now a museum.

The store once belonged to a mining company, when the price of silver declined, the mining company boarded up the store and moved on.

When Donna and Don purchased the store some 33 years ago, they found a perfectly intact general store from 1922! Everything was covered in bat guano and rat droppings. It took 3 years to clean the shelves,

to clean everything on the shelves

and re-open the general store as a museum! It is full of everything from chewing tobacco, baby shoes, mining equipment, well pulleys, saddles, and a post office!

Chuck, Donna and Sue stand next to a table full of chemists tools needed for the mine!

Even the hoop for the old hoop skirts the women wore in those days!

Donna demonstrates how the old post office typewriter still works!

Next to the campground, behind the museum, sits Harry Pye's cabin! Don, Donna and their daughter Linda totally renovated the interior of the old cabin, leaving the outside as original ad possible! I love this bathroom sink!

The outside of the Harry Pye cabin!

Emily, Sue and crew and Donna outside!

The outhouse even comes complete 

with a satellite dish!

Chuck and I love Chloride, we go every Halloween! What better place to spend Halloween than in a ghost town? We would love to have you come join us sometime!

While shopping in downtown Truth or Consequences NM, believe it or not... Chuck found a beer called..

MotherShip Beer! Can you believe it??? An organic beer brewed in Colorado! I just had to take a photo of it to show ya'll because I knew you wouldn't believe it either!

Happy Trails to you from Geri, Chuck and our hound herd, Scotty, DoogieBowser and Radar!

On The Road Again!

BACK TO FLORIDA!

We finally left Truth or Consequences NM and drove 40 miles to get to our favorite little Ghost Town of Chloride NM!  LOL! Long drive! But what better place to spend Halloween than in a real bona fide

ghost town???

We love any excuse just to go there!

This year we had visitors of the UNghostly kind!

Mule deer! They came up just at dusk every night.

We had two other campers there hunting deer!

But they can shoot only bucks and all they could

find were does! These does were cautious but

not too shy.

 

We gave you a lot of photos last july when we visited Chloride so I won't do that to you again. If you want more photos you can hunt them up in the July Archives. What I will do is give you a link:

http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/chloride.html

This is a great link all about Chloride NM !!!

After we finally tore ourselves away from Chloride,

we returned to Three Rivers Petroglyph Park.

This is another of our favorite places. We posted about it last year with a lot of photos so this year

I am just gonna give you a few pics and this link that will tell you all about this interesting area!

          http://www.desertusa.com/mag98/mar/poi/du_3rivers.html

You can click onto the signs to make them

full sized and readable.

If you want to see more photos you can click onto the post from last year or the link!

Our good friend from Truth or Consequences, the tie dye king! :-) Jeff Dukatt came up with a wonderful logo for TheMotherShip! We put it on while we were camped in Chloride!

We just love the Logo! Thank you Jeff!

Then when we left Three Rivers, we visited a friend

in High Rolls NM. We met her last year at the

Three Rivers Trading Post. Sue now has her own

shop in High Rolls, near Cloudcroft NM. When we

walked in, we passed by this fellow!

He became our alien mascott for the MotherShip! Now we need a name....  any suggestions??

Tonight we are in an Escapee RV park in Lakewood NM. Tomorrow we will finally drive out of NM and enter Texas! Ya'll know how long it takes to get through Texas???  A danged long time!

Especially when you follow the 4-4-2 rule like we do.

4 hours driving or 4 PM or 200 miles, whichever comes first!

That is why we still love travelling! 

We don't push it! We take our time!

Good advice!!!

Happy Trails from The MotherShip!

Geri, Chuck and our furkids

Scotty and DoogieBowser 

Visiting the town of Chloride NM

Visiting a Wild West Ghost Town

In the previous blog, we showed you the road to Chloride NM. It is our favorite ghost town so far! It is worth the 35 or so mile drive from I-25 in NM. You will be on Highway 52 once you leave the interstate. 52 is well maintained and an amazingly beautiful stretch of road. Chloride is at the end of the paved road.

Before I start with the photographs, I want to give you some of the history of Chloride as told by Raymond Schmidt (1897-1996). He moved to Chloride in 1905 and lived there until 1991. He knew the history and the flavor of his town, he is buried in the Greenwood Cemetery in Chloride.
"Chloride got its start in the late 1870's by accident. Harry Pye found some "float" that looked promising. He had the rocks assayed and found out they were rich in chloride of silver.  With 2 companions, he returned to Chloride Canyon and staked a claim. Within months the Pye party was attacked by Indians and Pye was killed.
Word got out that there was a rich silver strike, and by 1880 miners had flocked in and a tent city sprang up.
By 1881, Chloride had 8 saloons, 3 mercantile stores, a hotel, boarding houses, an assay office, livery stables, a candy store, a drug store, a law office, a Chinese laundry and a millinery store.
In 1881, the Pioneer Stage Line ran into Chloride and the U.S. government established a post office. In 1882, a newspaper called "The Black Range" (named for the mountain range) was established by Mr. Beckett. It is reported that the new city had at least one, and probably more, brothels. The population grew to about 3,000 during it's heyday. Because of the scarcity of women in the toen, the "city fathers" offered a free building site to single women who chose Chloride as a place to live.
Chloride started it's decline in the mid-1890's when the U.S. government chose gold as the monetary standard.  Silver mining towns all over the west began an immediate decline because the price of silver dropped so low it wasn't worth hauling out."

This is the Hanging Tree, the first thing you see when you come to town. It is across from the old saloon. For most of these images, I used infra-red filters to give a "ghostly" feel to the town!

Hanging Tree

One of the stone fences of the area

The nicest front yard!

Skull (deer?) hanging from a tree

One of Chloride's earliest saloons.

It was a Post Office until 1957 when it closed.

This building was the only bank. Built of native stone, it has been restored with adobe bricks made on site. It has hopes of becoming a restaurant.

This large log building is the wonderful Pioneer Store!

1880-1923. This building has been placed on the state of NM Register of Historic Buildings.  I did a blog about it last year, if you would like to see more of the Pioneer Store, click here:  http://phunnyfarm.blogspot.com/2009/11/ghost-towm-of-chloride-nm.html

http://www.pioneerstoremuseum.com/

This large adobe building was built as the Monte Cristo Saloon. It was also used as a school house and various mining companies used the building as headquarters. Also on Historic Register. It is now an art gallery and gift shop.

There is a great little campground in Chloride.

the MotherShip felt right at home here! Campground is behind the Museum and Monte Christo. Only 5 camp sites, all with full hook-ups for $20 per night.

Chuck and his friend Jim sitting outside the Monte Christo Gallery. I look like a ghost between their 2 faces!

Looking under the sign, you see the town and the Hanging Tree. The tree is almost the same size as photographs of ot taken at the turn of the century!

The logs used to build the museum were huge, at least 10-12 inches wide!

This flower is the NM version of Bird of Paradise!

This old cabin has been recently purchased and renovations started.

This is the Joe Pye Cabin. It has been totally restored.

The old saloon in color, as it looks today.

This is Dona Edmund. She and her husband Don are responsible for most of the restoration taking place in Chloride.

This is the interior of the Joe Pye cabin. It is fully restored, although not back to the original, it is much more beautiful and comfey than the original interior.

They used sliding barn door style for the bedroom because the cabin is so small, no room for standard swinging doors.

One of the two bedrooms.

I love the bathroom sink !!!

Mrs. Edmund, Jim and Chuck, in the livingroom of the Joe Pye cabin.

The bedroom door to the front bedroom are like saloon doors.

The front door

I have never seen a satellite dish on an outhouse!

One of the older buildings showung rock work

You can click on this photo (or any of the photos here) and make it larger and read the roadside sign about Chloride.

Detail of one of the old wrought iron fences made with a portable forge in the early 1900's.

The fence connecting the museum and

The Monte Cristo.

Chuck walking past the old bank.

This is the Cassie Hobbs stone house and workshop. She called it her ""DoodleDum" house.

This is another view of the old bank.

This is the fence and back porch to the Joe Pye cabin.

I hope ya'll enjoyed this trip to Chloride NM as much as Chuck and I did. We love it there! Make sure you put Chloride NM on your "bucket list" for sure!

We love you all! Keep in touch with us!

Reporting from the MotherShip:

Geri Chuck and the Hound Herd

Scotty, DoogieBowser and Radar!