We are now camping at Mimbres River in Coony Canyon. The canyon is lovely, a meadow with tall grasses yellow asters, yarrow, purple geranium flowers, larkspur, ponderosa pine, junipers and a bunch of stuff that I don’t know, but hope to learn in the near future.
When we left Datil Wells we went to Reserve one of our favorite towns in New Mexico. We planned to ride our bikes from Reserve to Willow Creek to Mogollon and the back up to Reserve. However, on the first night our campsite was off of Hwy 435, down a short dirt road, what we didn’t know was that the road and the whole area was covered with goat heads, a bike tires worst enemy. First Dans back tire got a flat with several holes from the goat heads, then both of the Doggy Ride tires picked up a bunch of heads and popped as well. There were so many holes from the goat heads we didn’t have enough patches to patch them all (Dan had a spare tube, but we didn't have spares for the doggy ride), so that was the end of that ride.
The next morning a woman who lives on some private property behind where we were camping gave me a ride into town to pick up the car. She was very interesting, her name is Kiva Rose and she is an herbalist and part of the Anima Center. The Anima Center hosts retreats and woman specific workshops among other things. The Center is run on solar power, I would like to come back and visit the center at some point in time. Meeting her got me thinking about my relationship with plants and how I’ve let it slip in recent years. I’ve always been fascinated with plants, especially wild native plants and how they can be used for food, medicine and simple products. Hopefully while we are working on this project I can regain my relationship with plants and can learn more about them and their potential uses.
Anyways… I brought the car back to what we refer to as “goat head” camp and we reloaded our equipment into the car and headed back to town. We went to the Alamo Café where there is wireless internet and we could research where we could get some spare tires and more patches. We decided to have lunch there too. The guy at the counter was nice and kinda funny, he was an older gentleman and he kept saying things “move at the speed of light.” He enters our orders into the computer and they’re sent back to the kitchen “at the speed of light.” We can open up our computers and have internet connection “at the speed of light.” He was cute, I love people.
Dan found a bike shop in Silver City, the Gila Hike and Bike, that had the tubes we needed. We thought about having them send the tubes to us, but in the end we decided to drive to Silver City to pick up the tubes and patches. On our way there we saw a sign advertising the San Francisco Hot Springs we decided to stop and check them out (we hadn’t had a bath in awhile and hot springs sounded nice). We hiked partway down the trail and decided that this might be a long enough hike that we might want some water. So we headed back up to the trailhead. When we reached the top a man with a pickup truck had just dropped off a man and a woman. It looked like they had been on the road for awhile and from what I caught from their conversation the man in the pickup gave them a ride, but didn’t really know them. They were headed down to the springs as well.
Just before we started the trek back down a man came up from the springs. He told us the trail was about a mile and a half and fairly steep, so we were glad we came back for water. He also told us how to find the hot springs. His wife came up from the springs a few minutes after him. She said she saw a snake on the trail (gold with black stripes). We headed down and we decided to keep the dogs on the leash since a snake had been spotted and since the area seemed like good habitat for rattlers. Good thing we did because a ways down the trail we saw a big rattler it was pissed at us,it rattled a ton and went under a rock. It startled us, but we had been on the look out so it wasn't too bad. It was also a good thing that the man told us how to get to the springs because even with his directions we had a hard time finding them. Once we found them we were very disappointed, they were tiny and very shallow. Since it was starting to get dark and the springs weren’t that impressive we decided to forget it and hike back out. That night we ended up camping out at Bill Evens Lake.
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