Southern New Mexico: hot peppers and much more spice travel discoveries in a varied land whose attractions range from sand dunes and ski slopes to colossal caverns and UFO museums

Travel America, May-June, 2005 by Dave G. Houser

IF YOU'VE EVER PONDERED THE SOURCE OF NEW Mexico's famous tongue-tingling chile, look no further than the Southern Rio Grande Valley, home to the world's largest chile crop. The unassuming village of Hatch is the state's most renowned chile-producing community, and each Labor Day it hosts the Hatch Chile Fiesta. We're talking about those zesty red (and milder green) chiles that smother enchiladas served throughout the state--from Artesia to Zuni.

Nearby Las Cruces. New Mexico's second largest city and home to New Mexico State University, has the nation's only chile institute and also stages an annual celebration in honor of the noble chile. At the Whole Enchilada Fiesta each September, the whole idea is to build the world's largest enchilada--a feat they somehow manage to accomplish year after year.

Notwithstanding the fame of its piquant peppers, the southern realm of the Land of Enchantment may be even more widely known for the likes of Carlsbad Caverns, Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa, UFOs--or even a mushroom cloud in the desert.

Las Cruces is not only about chile but is fast gaining a visitor following for its $7.4-million New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, which opened in 1998. Spread over 47 acres, it chronicles the 3,000-year history of New Mexico's agriculture and rural life, featuring a working farm and ranch, live animals, more than 25,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space, a theater, demonstration kitchen, restaurant, old-time general store, and a produce market.

Neighboring Mesilla, however, remains the region's leading attraction. For centuries this picturesque adobe village was a center of Spanish Colonial influence, and its well-preserved Plaza stands much as it did the day it witnessed the signing of the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Nowadays Mesilla hosts a variety of celebrations, including a colorful Cinco de Mayo (May 5) Fiesta.

In Deming, west of Las Cruces on Interstate 10, the Deming Luna Mimbres Indian Museum spotlights pioneer lore and Native American culture. In the nearby Florida Mountains, rock and mineral hunters can find agate, jasper, opal, quartz crystals, and other stones at Rockhound State Park, 14 miles from town. City of Rocks State Park, to the northwest, awes visitors with rows of sculpted monoliths. Both parks offer camping and hiking.

South of Deming, the border town of Columbus earned a unique footnote in the annals of American history when, on March 16, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa sent 400 of his troops on a pre-dawn raid of the town. The incursion was soon thwarted but the incident remains the last time a hostile foreign force ever crossed a U. S. border.

Another of the West's most legendary desperadoes, Billy the Kid, waited tables at the Star Hotel in Silver City as a youth. It was in the violence-prone village of Lincoln some miles to the east that the Kid really made a name for himself, but Silver City managed a fine reputation as a rowdy mining town without him. Much of its 19th century Victorian architecture survives to this day, charming the many visitors who choose Silver City as a base for exploring the surrounding ghost towns of Shakespeare, Steins, Kingston, and Mogollon--and the mystery-shrouded remains of an ancient Indian culture at Gila Cliffs Dwellings National Monument.

Driving eastward across a dramatic landscape of basin and range, visitors can roam a national monument of an entirely different kind near Alamogordo. White Sands National Monument is an astonishing 275-square-mile sea of sugar-white gypsum sand shaped by the wind into the most beautiful dunes this side of the Sahara. It was just to the north of Alamogordo--at Trinity Site on White Sands Missile Range--that the world's first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. Tours are available twice a year, on the first Saturday in April and October, to visit the actual blast site.

One of Southern New Mexico's most scenic drives leads east from Alamogordo up through Lincoln National Forest to the alpine village of Cloudcroft and on to the popular all-season resort town of Ruidoso. Outdoor enthusiasts favor this little mountain town for its fine golf courses, hiking, biking, and fishing, while others are drawn to a summer-long series of thoroughbred and quarter horse racing at Ruidoso Downs and casino gambling at the nearby Mescalero Apache reservation. The enterprising Mescalero tribe also operates the sprawling Inn of the Mountain Gods resort, which has been totally rebuilt and is slated to reopen this spring, and Ski Apache, the nation's southernmost major ski area, situated on the slopes of 12,003-foot-high Sierra Blanca peak.

Cultural interests in the region got a giant boost with the 1997 opening of the $20-million Spencer Theater for the Performing Arts, a stunning wedge-shaped complex situated atop a scenic mesa just north of Ruidoso. Proclaimed the finest performance hall in the Southwest, it offers a year-round schedule of Broadway shows, classical, pops and jazz concerts, and dance performances.