Interstates are good if you need to be somewhere by a certain time on a certain day, or if you’re one of those travelers that prefers to know what sort of food is available at each exit, but sometimes it’s nice to take it slower, turn the GPS off, and just wander down an enchanting road.
Smack dab in the middle of New Mexico is just such a road: Highway 55, just north of the White Sands missile range. If you head north out of El Paso on 54 on your roundabout way to Santa Fe, you’ll pass through Alamogordo and Tularosa. If you don’t wander off to the east and head through the mountains to Ruidoso, Cloudcroft, Loncoln, Capitan, or the ghost towns of White Oaks or Ft Stanton, that is. That’s Billy the Kid country up there. But even if you deviate up through the mountains, when you head back west you’ll intersect 54 once more and as you head north the land gets more and more empty, and eventually you’ll see highway 55 heading off to the left.
Old School House in the ghost town on Claunch, NM.
As you head up 55, it zig-zags through some of the emptiest country left in New Mexico. Antelope and jackrabbits outnumber the cows out there. Abandoned ranch houses, farming equipment, vehicles, churches, schools, and towns like Claunch litter the countryside as if everybody high tailed it out of the country pre-WWII. About halfway between Hwy 54 in the south and Hwy 60 at the north end of 55 are the Salinas Pueblo Mission Ruins and Gran Quivira, which are ruins of both a Spanish Mission dating from the late 1500’s as well as a Peublo Indian city that dates back to the 1200’s.
Abo Mission and Kiva in New Mexico
After leaving the Missions, the nearest gas and food are in Mountainaire at the intersection of Hwy 60 and Hwy 55.
Where do you go to get away from it all? Please leave us a comment and tell us about it, because there’s nothing we enjoy more than heading somewhere new! Be sure to check PPL Motorhomes for travel specials before you depart your driveway!
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Claunch school photo from: http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/projects/claunch-school-claunch-nm/
Gran Quivira photo taken from: http://www.nps.gov/sapu/historyculture/gran-quivira.htm