2026 Condo Week: Ruidoso & Santa Fe, part 2

This is part two of this post. Read 'em in order. Here's a link to Part one.

Second Day (Sunday) (continued) 

Nancy had downloaded an audio tour of White Sands National Park from a company she had used before, which reads your position by GPS and gives a short lecture about what you're looking at. It was informative and, once we figured out the abiding Bluetooth question, easy to listen to. The information covered the flora and fauna, the geology of the area, and a lot of the history. The style of the talk was casual, although after hearing the guy's spiel about scorpions half a dozen times (we kept passing the spot that prompted that part of the program), I was ready to stop listening. (There was about an hour and a half's worth of talks for the 3-hour hike to the Alkali Flats and back, which we didn't do, so we heard that part from manual prompts on the way back to Ruidoso.) 

We got to the park a little before 6, wanting to see the sunset there. That meant a lot of driving around, staring at the sand through the car windows, because it was around 100 degrees (though falling slowly; by sunset it was down to about 93). When we did get out of the car, we didn't ALL get ot of the car, so we kept it running and the A/C blasting. 

White Sands is one of the most mystically beautiful places on earth that I know of, but if you don't get out of the car, there's not a whole lot to hold your interest. There's only one road, with a loop at the end. We drove back and forth four or five times, looking for a pristine area, devoid of other humans, from which to watch the sunset (and hearing about scorpions). Naturally, such a place doesn't exist, so we finally settled for an area not TOO over-worked with footprints and folding chairs.

Nancy and Sherry walked down a wide trail for about a quarter of a mile; I climbed a dune and ended up in conversation with an elderly couple from Florida who felt that, yes, they could have brought their 30' Winnebago in, instead of leaving it in Alamogordo and detaching the drag-sedan. Jeff stayed in the car, which was parked in a shady spot, so the A/C and the engine could be off.

sunset at White Sands

Sunset was very pretty, of course, but not the kind of glorious light show I had hoped to see. More like a really nice sunset back home, but with no clouds at all to catch the changing colours of the fading light. 

"World's Largest Pistachio"

I had a couple of minor sights picked out for the trip back to Ruidoso. First was a scrap-metal roadrunner statue, but it was dark and the yard-art wasn't lit and it was on the far side of an industrial scrap metal dealer's lot, so we couldn't actually make it out. Next was the World's Largest Pistachio nut, at a place called Pistachioland, a bit north of Alamogordo. It was lit, but the parking lot for the business was blocked off at night, so I had to settle for a photo taken from the farther side of a divided highway..

Finally, we stopped at St Joseph's Apache Mission Church, on the Mescalero reservation. Now that was impressive. It was unlit and too dark to get a picture, so we plan to go back (it's about 18 miles away) at another time in order to take a good look at it.

We finished the night at Denny's. That, and Sonic, are literally the only places in Ruidoso open that late on a Sunday night. Nancy called it grim. Le mot juste, I think. When we arrived there was only one other table occupied, and we were seated across a narrow aisle from those people, who looked like the sort that rode loud motorcycles through trailer parks on the way to the tattoo parlour from the dive-bar. Soon others arrived, people who seemed to be members of a rival gang. We thought briefly about moving to another table, but then realised that there was a convention of loud-motorcycle-riding tattoo artists in town, and they were all either there at Denny's, or at Sonic. Because, as I mentioned, those are the only places open in Ruidoso late on a Sunday night.

 

There's a sign pasted to the restaurant's entry door with a long list of things they're out of, and the waitress (who is quitting -- this was her last night working there) said the list was far from complete. No fries. No lettuce. No milk. The manager just didn't order anything.  

Maybe she's an example of why businesses think AI is a good thing.

 

 

 Third Day (Monday) 

 

Three days into our 2026 Condo Week, and we have three locations on our catch-up list: Monjeau Lookout, St Joseph''s Apache Mission Church; and now, Smokey Bear Museum and Grave.

That last was the first planned stop on our tracing of the Billy the Kid Trail, a fifty-mile scenic drive from Ruidoso to Capitan to Hondo and back in a big triangle. (One wonders if we couldn't find some better name for such a pleasant drive than that of a murderous criminal who is famous for no good reason?) When we loaded the route into Google Maps, it told us the park was closed on Mondays, but since it was right on the way to everything else, we decided to stop there anyway, to see what we could see. It looks nice, and isn't too far from Ruidoso, so we plan to come back when it's open.

Smokey Bear Mountain

We went just a few more miles down the road to a spot where you can see Smokey Bear Mountain. It was here, during a forest fire in 1950, that a bear cub was found clinging to a burnt tree. He was rescued by firefighters and named Smokey, and the rest, as they say....  Smokey died a few years back, and was buried at the Smokey Bear Park in Capitan.

Just south of there is Fort Stanton, an army post established in 1855 to give protection to the white settlers moving in to the New Mexico territory, where they were harassed by the Apache, who lived here before but never thought to organize a garrison of their own to protect themselves from the white settlers, or even the Mexicans, who started arriving a few hundred or so years before the Americans.

Anyway, the US Army set up Fort Stanton in 1855. Within a few years it was taken over by a group of Confederates out of Texas, who thought to reclaim the land Texas had ceded to the United States in order to be accepted into the Union in 1845.The Mescalero Apache didn't think much of that plan, and chased the rebel traitors out and burned down the fort. 

A few years later, Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson was named the new commander of the post, and ordered to rebuild it with adobe bricks. He had it rebuilt with sandstone instead, and despite periods of different uses, and periods of abandonment, it has remained in fair shape. The State of New Mexico owns it now, and is gradually bringing it back to its earlier glory. (The regional director was on site when we visited; we overheard him giving restaurant recommendations to a group from another museum. He gave us a thumbnail sketch of what's involved in preserving a 150-year-old complex of that size, from foundations to rooves ... and he gave us good information about lunch in the area. I felt a little bad about being more intensely interested in the latter than the former. But it was lunchtime.)

Once the army was done with it, the fort became a tuberculosis hospital. When that was done, it was used as a place to hold the crew of a German ocean liner, the SS Columbus, which was scuttled off the American coast to avoid capture by the British in the early days of World War II. The fact that the Columbus was shadowed by a US Navy cruiser, the Tuskeegee, when it tried to escape the British navy --- the Tuskeegee made daily radio reports of the ship's location, so it was easy for the British navy to locate the vessel -- was one of the war-like events that Hitler used to justify declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor. The British destroyer didn't have the capacity for 410 prisoners, so the remaining men on the Columbus were rescued by the Tuskeegee, and ended up, eventually, interned in Fort Stanton, because the British wouldn't guarantee them a safe passage. (Those men not of military age, and all the women and children, had been allowed to leave long before the Columbus' attempt to escape back to Germany.)

And once war existed between the United States and Germany, the rules changed. Suddenly these men, who had been guests of the United States, became prisoners, and Fort Stanton had to be enclosed and a curfew enforced. That was pretty much it. (I remember when we visited the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas -- also a POW camp during the war -- the main thing keeping the prisoners in was the remoteness of their prisons. I guess escaping from a prison in such a vast, desolate area would be enough to dissuade most people from trying it; especially when they're relatively well-treated. Might have been different if it was in, say, Siberia, where prisoners of war were routinely abused.)

Of course, in each of its incarnations, the fort's physical appearance was revised. Mostly, the buildings were added on to. So there's not a lot of the original Kit Carson fort left. Maybe that's why none of us thought to take a single picture of the place. So here is one taken from some web site, a picture of the main building:

 

I spent most of our time at Fort Stanton in that main building, reading about the Columbus internees, while Sherry sat out on the back porch, reading up on World Cup events, and Nancy and Jeff started around the Quadrangle, looking at the buildings. When I came out and joined her, Sherry said she was hungry and wanted to leave to go eat. The only restaurants in the area -- according to the fort's manager -- were two in Capitan: the Oso Grill, which is closed on Mondays, and the Smokey Bear Cafe. He also told us that the grocery store on the main road in Capitan had a deli that made pretty good sandwiches.

We opted for the Smokey Bear Cafe. "Breakfast All Day." "Lunch All Day." I ordered a smothered green chile breakfast burrito with bacon and refritos; Sherry had a Number Ten, which is some kind of steak sandwich. And we ordered onion rings, because it's National Onion Ring Day. Sherry's sandwich was pretty good. You could tell, because it was kind of messy. Her onion rings were okay (we were supposed to split them, but I only got two). Her stomach has been kind of upset ever since lunch, so, karma.

My burrito was, well, not very good. Whatever kind of green chile they were using, it didn't have much of a pleasant flavour. It tasted kind of thin and watery, if that's possible, with absolutely no kick to it. Would not order again. It was filling, though, and as I write this we are making our dinner plans. Sherry is skipping dinner because her stomach is upset; I'm skipping dinner because I'm just not hungry; and Nancy and Jeff are trying to decide where to go (though my suspicion is that Nancy is only going because Jeff wants to go out, and she feels uncomfortable having him go out on his own in a strange town, especially with the narrow mountain road leading up to our condo, and other traffic related concerns.)

We next found ourselves in the town of Lincoln, famous for the Lincoln County War. 

Everything I had ever known about the Lincoln County War in the late 1870s turns out to be wrong.* I had thought it was a fight between sheep ranchers and cattle ranchers in the days before barbed wire and competent law enforcement. It turns out, though, that it was nothing but a gang war between two groups of greedy men. Lawyers, of course, figured prominently in the sleazefest, as did politicians and a rich kid from England. It is one of the events that led to our national expectations of integrity in public dealings, expectations that lasted and grew until, oh, just the last few years. This is where Billy the Kid made his name, not because he was the best or the worst of the lot involved in the gang war, but because he was willing to talk candidly to reporters, who even back then would be happy to glorify anyone who gave them what seemed like information. Having a drink with Billy was like getting a press release that didn't really have to be fact-checked or edited.

El Torréon, Lincoln

We arrived in Lincoln just before 4PM, the hour at which everything closes. We didn't mind a bit. We found the little museum, which also closes at 4, but (for reasons that they never explained) they stop selling tickets to all the venues at 3:30, lock their own doors at 4PM, but don't go home until 5PM. So we took our time going through the museum, learning about the area's history, including that Lincoln County War, long after closing time. We then drove through the little one-street town, reading all the historical markers, and on extremely rare occasions snapping a photo (of one place only: El Torréon, a small fortification that proved useful in the 1870s). That was the end of the educational portion of our day-plan. From there it was just a pleasant drive through scenic countryside back to Ruidoso, trying to get the Bluetooth to work.

 

* To be honest, I mostly know it from uninformative highway signs and the occasional reference on old  TV westerns that I hardly ever watched and never paid attention to.

 

 

Fourth Day (Tuesday)

 

We began Tuesday morning trying to track down a sculpture of galloping horses that I had found references to in various on-line guides. It was supposedly located at Ruidoso Downs, which I had thought was a race track but which turns out to be a town of sorts that has a race track called Ruidoso Downs. Also a casino called Ruidoso Downs. And a church called Ruidoso Downs. The race track was, we were told, damaged in the flood a couple of years ago -- I couldn't see any damage, but whatever -- and the casino was only open on weekends. There were, however, some people at the church, doing some church-thing, and they were forthcoming. The lady doing some gardening at the church entrance said she didn't know about any galloping-horse sculpture, but said that we should check at the Billy-the-Kid Trail Visitors' Center, half a mile or so east on the highway.

 

The Visitors' Center was quite interesting and informative; in fact, it would have been a good place to have started our visit a few days before. In addition to info about everything to see or do in the Ruidoso area, and a little museum of the area's history (and not just the Lincoln County War), they had, just across the driveway, a collection of sculptures of galloping horses.

 

the one bronze statue   

I'm going to assume that the woman I spoke to at the church didn't think of these as sculptures because they weren't bronze or marble statues. I don't know what they were made of; they looked like plastic painted realistically. There is a single bronze of two horses fighting, but it's kind of hidden away at the back, by the entrance to another permanently-closed museum-type attraction, another thing that we had been looking for. But in front of that is a spread containing realistic statues of various breeds of horses, all galloping from west to east: standardbred, Morgan, Arabian, American Paint, appaloosa, quarter horse, and thoroughbred. The overall installation is called Free Spirits at Noisy Water ("Ruidoso" means "very noisy", and the town got its name from the noise of the local creek going over rocks.) and exploring it provides a very pleasant, relaxing and interesting diversion for half an hour or so. Anyone visiting Ruidoso should make it a point to check this spot out.

 

Free Spirits at Noisy Water: Quarter Horse & Thoroughbred

We had a quick lunch then, at a little taquería just up the road -- just okay, nothing to write home about -- then headed back up to Capitan, to check out Smokey Bear Park. 

 

Smokey Bear Park is only about two acres square. At the southwestern corner is a visitors' center, with a small exhibition telling the story of the bear: a cub found clinging to a burnt tree during a forest fire in (I think) 1950. The fire-prevention character had already been created some years before, and was known well enough for the man who rescued the cub to name it after the existing mascot, much as we named our dog after our hero, Carli Lloyd ... except we use the traditional spelling. But I digress, as usual. 

 

So the bear cub was taken to a local vet and treated for burns, and eventually it found its way to the National Zoo, where it lived out its life and where my wife and her sister saw it when they were kids visiting the national capital. Maybe. There was some discussion around that particular point, and I wasn't really paying any attention anyway, so maybe they disagree on whether they saw it or not. I don't know, and I'm still not paying much attention to the matter.

 

the stream at Smokey Bear Park

The park is basically a very well tended garden, and in the back corner is the bear's grave. A rock was brought down from the mountain where the cub was found, to serve as a headstone. It was affixed with a bronze plaque, and a prettily landscaped stream trickles out from the grave, across the park. A very attractive setting. The site was chosen in preference to a location on Smokey Bear Mountain because of concerns about vandalism or animal depredations. It was a good choice, and let's face it: the bear doesn't care.

 

There didn't seem to be much else to the town of Capitan, except two gift shops: one, right next to the park and operated by the town, was closed. The other was a very small room in a restaurant building across the street. We went over there to look at the tchotchkes, but there was nothing of interest, so we had a scoop of ice cream each, and left to continue our catch-up tour.

 

Monjeau Lookout Tower

A short distance to the west is the Monjeau Lookout Tower. I forget now why this place is well-known in the local area, but climbing up the tower for the views is something that everybody does. We did. The tower is a two-storey stone construct on top of an unremarkable mountain, I guess intended for fire-spotting, but I reckon now it's mainly a place for high-school students and hikers to go. It has good long views in every direction, but not of anything particularly interesting or unique. You can see some of the outskirts of Ruidoso, and there are a few somewhat interesting rock formations; that's about it. It's mildly strenuous, getting up there (even if you don't count the six miles of narrow gravel road), and then a climb from the parking lot of maybe a hundred feet? Probably less, but at this point in life, I'm going to say it was at least a hundred feet, straight up, coming and going.

 

We stopped for dinner on the way back into town at a place called Anaheim Jack's, I think. I don't know how the decision was made; I was pumping gas into the Ghostbusters' Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man's SUV when the discussion was held. All I remember of it was the odd layout: the kitchen, it seems, was on the second story of the building. We were seated in what I would call a tavern room -- there was a bar and several televisions showing sporting events, but fortunately one of those events was a World Cup match, so we were happy. Our waiter was a very tall young man who didn't seem to mind in the least when Sherry asked him not to walk in front of the television, and to tell another tall young man to do the same. She said it nicely, but still ... they had to go there, that was where they picked up drinks for customers.

 

I don't recall anything else about the experience, except that it was generally positive.

 

We finished up the day with a walk up to the apartment complex's laundry, but there was only one washer in working condition and it was already in use; so, back to the condo and I guess we watched another soccer match on TV. I don't remember.

 

Continued in Part 3. Click below on "newer post."