Leave the ghosts behind

After we left the haunted museum in Clayton, NM, we drove to Carrizozo, hoping we’d left all ghosts behind.
Located on the northern end of the Tularosa Basin, Carrizozo is named after the reed grass, carrizo, with early settlers adding an extra “zo” to highlight its abundance.
Founded in 1899 by the El Paso and Northeastern Railway (EP&NE), it flourished while trains were in their heyday, serving as a hub for the railroad in that area.
It must have been a delightful small town because in the 1920’s Quentin Reynolds wrote, “I’ve discovered New Orleans, San Francisco, and a little place called Carrizozo, NM, where I want to go when I die. I want to go . . . [to the drugstore] and sneak behind the prescription counter with Art Rolland and have a nip of what he calls Old Granddaddy then type out his prescriptions for him” (The Wounded Don’t Cry, 103).
Unfortunately, Quentin Reynolds wasn’t the only ghost. Carrizozo is 35 miles east of the Trinity Site, so when the military detonated the first nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945, the blast shook houses and broke windows.
“Some people said they thought it was the end of the world because the sun was rising to the west instead of the east,” Tina Cordova recalled in Hannah Grover’s article, “Downwinders Continue to Seek Justice 79 Years after the Trinity Test,” (Tri-City Record, July 17, 2024).
The radioactive fallout continues to affect Carrizozo’s residents, causing health issues such as cancer, thyroid conditions, heart disease, and infertility.
Despite the nuclear contamination, the town’s population didn’t seriously decline until the 1950’s and 60’s along with the popularity of railroads.
Now fewer than 1,000 people live there. We spent the night at the Carrizozo Inn since the town is a staging area for nearby sites we wanted to see, including a lava field and ancient rock art.
The next morning, we drove four miles west of town to the Valley of Fires. Approximately 5,000 years ago, lava flowed to the earth’s surface along the Rio Grande Rift.
Experts say the molten rock streamed for about 30 years before Little Black Peak erupted, spewing out more magma and filling the Tularosa Basin 160 feet deep and covering 125 square miles, one of the largest lava fields in the world.
We parked near a picnic shelter, walked down the paved nature trail, and peered into lava caves where bats like to hang out though they didn’t stir.
We briefly left the trail and felt ripple upon ripple of cooled magma under our feet. It was like walking on an alien planet.
Since it was the very last day of December 2025, and cold, we didn’t see many animals, but a number of plants grew out of the inhospitable-looking black lava.
The Valley of Fires is a transition zone between prairie and desert, so many of the plants were familiar: Juniper, cholla, mesquite, creosote, and sage, but one plant stood out. It looked like a yucca except with a very tall, flowering stalk. Their common name is spoonplant because people once cut off the leaves, trimmed, and polished them to produce spoons.
After we stepped back onto the pavement, a family of five came down the trail toward us, the little boys hip hopping and shouting happily. We were no longer alone in an alien world and reentered the digital world when they asked us to photograph them as they posed against the black landscape.
We completed the loop, browsed through the visitor’s center, and climbed back into our 4-Runner. Then, we headed to the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site about 30 minutes away.
The Mogollon people flourished in New Mexico, Arizona, northern Sonora, Chihuahua, and western Texas between 200 and 1540 AD with the earliest dwellers living in pithouses and later ones building pueblos, cliff dwellings, and kivas. They farmed, raising maize, squash, and beans. They also hunted, fished, and harvested wild plants.
At the petroglyph site, I expected to see cliff art like we have in San Juan County, but as we started up the ridge, the Jornado Mogollon people had carved images on thousands of boulders on and off the trail with more than 21,000 petroglyphs documented.
Basalt is formed when lava cools rapidly, and these boulders had a dark patina which the artists had pecked or scraped to form images.
Among other things, we saw suns, masks, faces with almond-shaped eyes, lizards, big horned sheep, and handprints.
Geometric designs decorated some of the rocks and filled the interior of animals, birds, fish, and insects. A few of the pictures, using the shape of the rocks to create a 3-D effect, looked eerily life-like.
I confess we went a little crazy snapping photographs. Although some of the petroglyphs seemed to portray the supernatural, we didn’t feel any inexplicable chills indicating a ghostly presence.
We didn’t see any images of catastrophic events, no oozing magma or erupting volcanoes and certainly not the blinding blast of an atomic bomb that would come many years later, just the fabric of the Mogollon life, depicting their relationship to nature, their community, and the cosmos.
The drawings impacted us, communicating in a way that went far beyond words, and as we headed back down the ridge toward our vehicle, I wondered if anything in our technological age compared to the power and permanence of those etchings, providing portals into the hearts, minds, and spirits of an ancient people.