THROUGH THE PECOS NATIONAL FORESTS OF NEW MEXICO
The ordinary Easterner's idea of New Mexico is of a cloudless,
sun-scorched land where you can cook an egg by laying it on the sand any
day in the year, winter or summer. Yet when I went into the Pecos
National Forest, I put on the heaviest flannels I have ever worn in
northernmost Canada and found them inadequate. We were blocked by four
feet of snow on the trail; and one morning I had to break the ice in my
bedroom pitcher to get washing water. To be sure, it is hot enough in
New Mexico at all seasons of the year; and you can cook that egg all
right if you keep down on the desert sands of the southern lowlands and
mesas; but New Mexico isn't all scorched lowlands and burnt-up mesas.
You'll find your egg in cold storage if you go into the different
National Forests, for most of them lie above an altitude of 8,000 feet;
and at the headwaters of the Pecos, you are between 10,000 and 13,000
feet high, according as you camp on Baldy Pecos, or the Truchas, or
Grass Mountain, or in Horse-Thief Canyon.
There are several other ways in which the National Forests of New
Mexico discount Eastern expectation.
First of all, they are cheap; and that is not true of the majority of
trips through the West. Ordinarily, it costs more to take a trip to the
wilds of the West than to go to Europe. What with enormous distances to
be traversed and extortionate hotel charges, it is much cheaper to go to
Paris than to San Francisco; but this is not true of the Forests of New
Mexico. Prices have not yet been jacked up to "all the traffic will
stand." The constant half-hour leak of tips at every turn is unknown. If
you gave a tip to any of the ranch people who take care of you in the
National Forests of Mexico, the chances are they would hand it back,
leaving you a good deal smaller than you feel when you run the gauntlet
of forty servitors lined up in a Continental hotel for tips. In letters
of gold, let it be written across the face of the heavens--_There is
still a no-tip land._ As prices rule to-day in New Mexico, you can
literally take a holiday cheaper in the National Forests than you can
stay at home. Once you have reached the getting off place from the
transcontinental railroad, it will cost you to go into the Forests $4 an
hour by motor, and the roads are good enough to make a long trip fast.
In fact, you can set down the cost of going in and out at not less than
$2, nor more than $4. If you hire a team to go in, it will not cost you
more than $4 a day, including driver, driver's meals and horse feed. Or
you may still buy a pony in New Mexico at from $35 to $60, and so have
your own horse for a six weeks' holiday. To rent a horse by the month
would probably not cost $20. Set your going in charges down at $2--where
will you go? All through the National Forests of New Mexico are ranch
houses, usually old Mexican establishments taken over and modernized,
where you can board at from $8 to $10 a week. Don't picture to yourself
an adobe dwelling with a wash basin at the back door and a roller towel
that has been too popular; that day has been long passed in the ranches
of New Mexico. The chances are the adobe has been whitewashed, and your
room will look out either on the little courtyard in the center, or from
the piazza outside down the valleys; and somewhere along the courtyard
or piazza facing the valley will be a modern bathroom with hot and cold
water. The dining-room and living-room will be after the style of the
old Franciscan Mission architecture that dominates all the architecture
of the Southwest--conical arches opening from one room into another,
shut off, perhaps, by a wicket gate. Many of the ranch houses are
flanked by dozens of little portable, one-roomed bungalows, tar-paper
roof, shingle wainscot, and either white tenting or mosquito wire
halfway up; and this is by all odds the best type of room for the health
seeker who goes to New Mexico. He endangers neither himself nor others
by housing close to neighbors. In fact, the number of health seekers
living in such little portable boxes has become so great in New Mexico
that they are locally known as "tent-dwellers." It need scarcely be said
that there are dozens and dozens of ranch houses that will not take
tuberculous patients; so there is no danger to ordinary comers seeking a
holiday in the National Forests. On the other hand, there is no hardship
worked on the invalid. For a sum varying from $50 to $100, he can buy
his own ready-made, portable house; and arrangements can easily be made
for sending in meals.
[Illustration: Chili peppers drying outside pueblo dwelling. The
structure of sticks on the roof is a cage where an eagle is kept for its
feathers, which are used in religious rites]
The next surprise about the National Forests of New Mexico is the
excellence of roads and trails. You can go into the very heart of _most_
of the Forests by motor, of _all_ of the Forests by team (be sure to
hire a strong wagon); and you can ride almost to the last lap of the
highest peaks along bridle trails that are easy to the veriest beginner.
In the Pecos Forest are five or six hundred miles of such trails cut by
the rangers as their patrol route; and New Mexico has for some seasons
been cutting a graded wagon road clear across the ridges of two mountain
ranges, a great scenic highway from Santa Fe to Las Vegas, from eight to
ten thousand feet above sea level. One of the most marvelous roads in
the world it will be when it is finished, skirting inaccessible canyons,
shy Alpine lakes and the eternal snows all through such a forest of huge
mast pole yellow pine as might be the park domain of some old baronial
lord on the Rhine. This road is now built halfway from each end. It is
not clear of snow at the highest points till well on to the end of May;
but you can enter the Pecos at any season at right angles to this road,
going up the canyon from south to north.
The great surprise in the National Forests of New Mexico is the great
plenitude of game; and I suppose the Pecos of New Mexico and the White
Mountains of Arizona are the only sections of America of which this can
still be said. In two hours, you can pull out of the Pecos more trout
than your entire camp can eat in two days. Wild turkey and quail still
abound. Mountain lion and wildcat are still so frequent that they
constitute a peril to the deer, and the Forest Service actually needs
hunters to clear them out for preservation of the turkey and deer. As
for bear, as many as eight have been trapped in three weeks on the
Sangre de Christo Range. In one of the canyons forking off the Pecos at
right angles, twenty-six were trapped and shot in three months.
Lastly, the mountain canyons of New Mexico are second in grandeur to none
in the world. People here have not caught the climbing mania yet; that
will come. But there are snow peaks of 13,500 feet yet awaiting the
conqueror, and the scenery of the Upper Pecos might be a section of the
Alps or Canadian Rockies set bodily down in New Mexico. And please to
remember--with all these advantages, cheapness, good accommodation,
excellent trails and abundance of game--these National Forests of New
Mexico are only one day from Kansas City, only two days from Chicago,
only sixty hours from New York or Washington, which seems to prove that
the National Forests are as much a possession to the East as to the
West.
You can strike into the Pecos in one of three ways: by Santa Fe, by Las
Vegas, or by Glorieta, all on the main line of the railroad. I entered
by way of Glorieta because snow still packed the upper portions of the
scenic highway from Santa Fe and Las Vegas. As the train pants up over
the arid hills, 6,000, 7,000, 7,500 feet, you would never guess that
just behind these knolls of scrub pine and juniper, the foothills
rolling back to the mountains, whose snow peaks you can see on the blue
horizon, present a heavy growth of park-like yellow pine forests--trees
eighty to 150 feet high, straight as a mast, clear of under-branching
and underbrush, interspersed with cedar and juniper and Engelmann
spruce. Ten years ago, before the Pecos was taken in the National
Forests, goats and sheep ate these young pine seedlings down to the
ground; but of late, herds have been permitted only where the seedlings
have made headway enough to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are
growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out
by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and
in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in
five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years
this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval
state.
The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged
in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley
stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade
system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish
first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little
checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A
glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The
goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer
raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in
the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty
cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn
that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2
a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not
wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year
keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier
looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of
old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing
better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.
Then suddenly, it dawns on you--this is not America at all. It is a bit
of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the
wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health,
and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief.
The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the
fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter
skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats
bleating on the red sand hills--all complete the illusion that you have
waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to
Canada, New Mexico is to the United States--a mosaic in color; a bit of
the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the
picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of
progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are
still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive,
undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and
falls back in social envy and class hate. "Our people, no, they are not
ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth--no--we
have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little
whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on
de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"
"Mighty good," though I was not thinking of the poem. I was thinking of
the spirit that is contented enough to _see_ poetry in the great white
mountains through the door of a little whitewashed adobe room; and in
this case, it was a sick room. Presently, he got up out of his bed, and
donned an old military cape, and came out in the sunlight to have me
photograph him, so that his friends would have it _after_.
* * * * *
Having reached Glorieta, you have decided which of the many ranch houses
in the Pecos Forest you will stay at; or if you have not decided, a few
words of inquiry with the station agent or a Forest Service man will put
you wise; and you telephone in for rig or motor to come out for you. Any
normal traveler does not need to be told that these ranch houses are
not regular boarding houses as you understand that term; but as a great
many travelers are not normal, perhaps I should explain. The custom of
taking strangers has arisen from those old days when there were no inns
and all passers-by were given beds and meals as a matter of course.
Those days are past, but luckily for outsiders, the custom survives;
only remember while you pay, you go as a _guest_, and must not expect a
valet to clean your boots and to quake at any discord of nerves untuned
by the jar of town.
In half an hour after leaving the transcontinental train, we were
spinning out by motor to the well-known Harrison Ranch, the rolling,
earth-baked hills gradually rising, the forest growth thickening, the
little checkerboard farms taking on more and more the appearance of
settlement than on the desert which the railroads traverse. Presently,
at an elevation of 8,000 feet; we pulled up in Pecos Town before the
long, low, whitewashed ranch house, the two ends coming back in an L
round the court, the main entrance on the other side of it. You expected
to find wilderness. Well, there is an upright piano, and there is a
gramophone with latest musical records, and close by the davenport where
hangs a grizzly bear pelt, stands a banjo. You have scarcely got travel
togs off before dinner is sounded by the big copper ranch bell hung on
the piazza after the fashion of the Missions.
After dinner, you go over to the Supervisor's office for advice on going
up the canyon. Technically, this is not necessary; but it is wise for a
great many reasons. He will tell you where to get, and what to pay for,
your camp outfit; where to go and how to go. He will show you a map with
the leading trails and advise you as to the next stopping place. To hunt
predatory animals--bear and wolf and cat and mountain lion--you need no
permit; but if you are an outsider, you need one to get trout and turkey
and deer. Another point: are you aware that you are going into a country
as large as two or three of the Eastern States put together; and that
the forests in the upper canyons are very dense; and that you might get
lost; and that it is a good thing to leave somebody on the outside edge
who knows where you have gone?
On my way back from the Supervisor's office, the sick man called me in
and told me his life story and showed me his poem. As he is a Mexican,
has been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and is somewhat of
a politician, it may be worth while setting down his views.
"What is going to happen in Old Mexico?"
"Ah, only one t'ing possible--los Americanos must go in."
"Why?"
"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot--cannot control. Madero, he cannot
control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."
It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe
huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass
windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and
sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the
devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet
walls.
Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built
in--well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare
say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell
of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way
for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in
demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were
so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell
away and buried it in the mountains--where, no man knows: it has never
since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of
America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to
believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is
most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the
snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.
* * * * *
At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the canyon with a span
of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a
very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not
need to describe the trails up Pecos Canyon. I consider it a safer road
than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway
or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor
car, though the scenic highway cutting this at right angles will be
when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who
jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn
several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of
jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the
mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Canyon, now down on a
level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer
as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going
and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the
driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and
the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger
whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With
carelessness--well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went
over the edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily
wooded and you can't slide far.
Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for "the tent
dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how
they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your
own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from
Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where
the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and
heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and
miniature waterfalls. Wherever the canyon widens to little fields, the
Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch
to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round
rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the canyon forks to right
and left up other forested canyons, many of which, save for the hunter,
have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge
round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords,
loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the
two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty
miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You
are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no
lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the
wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear
their summits is the head of Pecos Canyon--a sort of snow top to the
sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the
west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right
on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except
the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.
[Illustration: The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically
communal dwellings five stories in height]
I had put on heaviest flannels in the morning; and now donned in
addition a cowboy slicker and was cold--this in a land where the
Easterner thinks you can sizzle eggs by laying them on the sand. An old
Mexican jumps into the front seat with the driver near a deserted mining
camp, and the two sing snatches of Spanish songs as we ascend the canyon.
Promptly at twelve, Tomaso turns back and asks me the time. When I say
it is dinner, he digs out of his box a paper of soda biscuits and asks
me to "have a crack." To reciprocate that kindness, I loan him my
collapsible drinking cup to go down to the canyon for some water.
Tomaso's courtesy is not to be outdone. After using, he dries that cup
off with an ancient bandana, which I am quite sure has been used for ten
years; but fortunately he does not offer me a drink.
Winsor's Ranch marks the end of the wagon road up the canyon. From this
point, travel must be on foot or horseback; and though the snow peaks
seem to wall in the north, they are really fifteen miles away with a
dozen canyons heavily forested like fields of wheat between you and them.
In fact, if you followed up any of these side canyons, you would find
them, too, dotted with ranch houses; but beyond them, upper reaches yet
untrod.
Up to the right, above a grove of white aspens straight and slender as a
bamboo forest, is a rounded, almost bare lookout peak 10,000 feet high
known as Grass Mountain. We zigzag up the lazy switchback trail, past
the ranger's log cabin, past a hunting lodge of some Texas club, through
the fenced ranch fields of some New York health seekers come to this
10,000 feet altitude horse ranching; and that brings up another
important feature of the "tent dwellers" in New Mexico. There is nothing
worse for the consumptive than idle time to brood over his own
depression. If he can combine outdoor sleeping and outdoor living and
twelve hours of sunshine in a climate of pure ozone with an easy
occupation, conditions are almost ideal for recovery; and that is what
thousands are doing--combining light farming, ranching, or fruit growing
with the search for health. We passed the invalid's camp chair on this
ranch where "broncho breaking" had been in progress.
Grass Mountain is used as a lookout station for fires on the Upper
Pecos. The world literally lies at your feet. You have all the
exaltation of the mountain climber without the travail and labor; for
the rangers have cut an easy trail up the ridge; and you stand with the
snow wall of the peaks on your north, the crumpled, purpling masses of
the Santa Fe Range across the Pecos Canyon, and the whole Pecos Valley
below you. Not a fire can start up for a hundred miles but the mushroom
cone of smoke is visible from Grass Mountain and the rangers spur to the
work of putting the fire out. Though thousands of outsiders camp and
hunt in Pecos Canyon every year, not $50 loss has occurred through fire;
and the fire patrol costs less than $47 a year. The "why" of this
compared to the fire-swept regions of Idaho is simply a matter of
trails. The rangers have cut five or six hundred miles of trails all
through the Pecos, along which they can spur at breakneck speed to put
out fires. In Idaho and Washington, thanks to the petty spites of local
congressmen and senators, the Service has been so crippled by lack of
funds that fewer trails have been cut through that heavy Northwest
timber; and men cannot get out on the ground soon enough to stop the
fire while it is small. So harshly has the small-minded policy of
penuriousness reacted on the Service in the Northwest that last year
the rangers had to take up a subscription among themselves to bury the
men who perished fighting fire. Pecos Service, too, had its struggle
against spite and incendiarism in the old days; but that is a story long
past; and to-day, Pecos stands as an example of what good trail making
will do to prevent fires.
We walked across the almost flat table of Grass Mountain and looked down
the east side into the Las Vegas Canyon. Four feet of snow still clung to
the east side of Grass Mountain, almost a straight precipice; and across
the forested valley lay another ten or twelve feet of snow on the upper
peaks of the Sangre de Christo Range. A pretty legend clings to that
Sangre de Christo Range; and because people repeat the foolish statement
that America's mountains lack legend and lore, I shall repeat it, though
it is so very old. The holy _padre_ was jogging along on his mule one
night leading his little pack burro behind, but so deeply lost in his
vesper thoughts that he forgot time and place. Suddenly, the mule
stopped midway in the trail. The holy father looked up suddenly from his
book of devotions. The rose-tinted afterglow of an Alpine sunset lay on
the glistening snows of the great silent range. He muttered an _Ave
Maria_; "Praise be God," he said; "for the Blood of Christ;" and as
Sangre de Christo the great white ridge has been known ever since.