Day Trips… Hatchita
In an effort to get back to nature and enjoy this beautiful area I’ve moved to, I plan to set aside one day a week to make a “simple day trip”.
My first trip is just to explore the area South of Silver City going down close to the Mexican border. I had just bought a new Honda Fit and this would be a good chance to see how it does. So with my trusty sidekick, Cinder, off we went. First stop was Lordsberg some 45 miles South West of home for a fill up and then I headed East on I-10 for NM 146 which took me South to the little burg of Hachita. 
Ok, that is not the whole town, but it is almost a ghost town. The cemetery some two miles south of town had some interesting graves with one person dying on the day I was born. I continued South on NM Hwy 81 to the border crossing station at Antelope Wells which has neither Antelope or Wells. No town just the border crossing station but Antelope Wells is the official southern starting point of the 3100-mile Continental Divide Trail. (BTW from where I live the next ridge a 1/4 mile to the East is the Continetal Devide). Most of the traffic you see on the highway is US Border Patrol (B.P.). Just to the East of the highway stands Big Hatchet Peak at 8,356 ft (1,132 m) and rises some 4,000 ft above the valley floor. 
The only real activity were big flatbed trucks hauling iron barriers that formed the “new” border fence. They were designed to prevent vechiles from crossing the border, but as with most defenses the smugglers just come up with inventive ways to get past the defenses. The goverment has a history of making mistakes with the fence in this area.
Back at Hachita I headed West on NM 9 towards Animas. The highway parallels the old train road bed with bits of the past still standing, old bridges with “1908″ stamped in the concrete, long unused sidings for loading cattle and goods, and ghosts of steam trains heading for ‘old El Paso….
Soon I came into the town of Animas, one cafe, post office, high school, a few houses, and not much else. Very unlike Hachita in that it was an active town. From the town I headed South on Hwy 338 to see where it goes. About 20 miles south of town the blacktop runs out and the road became a dirt superhighway (wish the road to my house was so smooth!). Now the Fit doesn’t have a lot of clearance but so long as the road was in such good shape I would press on. Soon I was being tailed by a B.P. pickup. He followed me for about 10 miles before turning off onto Geronimo Trail Road (looked interesting so I’ll save that for another day). The only traffic was B.P. going the other way on the road and off highway all over the place. Soon I was was in the Animas Valley proper with Animas Peak/Mountains as a great back drop off to the east.
I began to notice large dirt hauler trucks going north (empty) and lots of temporary warning signs (speed limit, no passing etc…). This seemed strange having all these large trucks out here (in the middle of no where). As I approached the point where 338 heads West into the Coronado National Forest I could see large dust plumes from the trucks heading East along 338. Sure enough as I was heading West the dirt trucks were heading East but now they were full. In about 5 miles a road off to the right (going North) is where the trucks were coming from. Mystery?
At this intersection was “Cloverdale” where the general store built in 1918 still stands.
Now 338 was getting pretty rough so I pulled over near a nice grove of Oaks and let Cinder explore. Very remote, isolated, and beautiful. Here I found the cocrete foundation of an old house that use to sit amougst the Oaks, must have been a really cool there in the shade. Now it was just a ride back up 338 and then to home. The only bad thing was I got a rock chip in my windshield 
and that happened on the backtop road North of Animas.
PS: The Honda Fit got 45.9 MPG for the day, Yea!
Bob…