Sacramento Mountains With New Friends

Saturday morning I met up with Chris and Kim from El Paso, TX to show them the local off road trails here in the Sacramento Mtns and to escape the 100+ temps here on the desert floor.

We started out in the lower mountains where desert plants still thrive, and the temps begin to drop. The NF roads are rocky and steep in these areas, so high clearance 4 wheel drive is a must. However these roads take you to the most amazing overlooks and scenery.

You may look at the road in the pics and say, hmmmmm that dosen't look so bad, thats because on the difficult parts we're to busy driving to take any pics, so don't let the flat areas fool you, it's a bumpy ride up and down the hills.

A little further up the mountains, I took them to see Bridal Veil Falls, a little known, unmarked waterfall tucked back in the mountains. The area used to be privite property, but the Forest service bought the land and opened it to the public. In the foreground you can see the old iron gate. Hard to make out, but it says Harris Hollow, the old gate has since been replaced with your standard green Forest Service Gate. I like the old one better.

It's about a half mile hike back to the falls, they are approx 50' tall and flow year round. They were a popular stop on the old Cloudclimbing RR of the 1900s. The rail road would stop by the falls so the riders could cool themselves in the mist of the falls before continuing on up into Cloudcroft.

After viewing the falls we continued our journey deeper into the forest.

One last overlook, before going up into the high mountains.

The high mountains provide a whole different ecosystem, tall pines, grassy hillsides and of course temps in the 60s and 70s. It was a great day exploring and showing new friends some little known and remote areas.

As you can tell by our little narrative at the top, we prefer to find the roads less traveled, not only when traveling the country with our RV, but also during stops along the way. You may ask how we find all these cool places to explore?? Well just like with RV forums, we frequent some off road forums and are able to connect with people from all over the country, who know all the secret little places in their backyard. A couple of the forums we visit are http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/ this is mainly for folks who enjoy off road adventure and Expedition type travel, http://www.militaryjeepers.com/community/ As the title says, it's active duty and military veterens who own and enjoy their Jeeps, they run the gamet from hard core rock crawling (not me) to adventure travel in their Jeeps (yup, thats more like us). As with the RV forums, these forums alow us to meet and connect with new people where ever we travel.

We look forward to meeting as many folks as we can during our Fulltime adventure and who knows we just run across some of you out on the trail, so get out there and explore some of those little known, hard to get to places, you will be plesently surprised by what you find (please make sure you have the proper vehicle and equipment for it)

Ok, See you out on the roads and trails less travelled.