The Organ Mountains rise as a serrated ridge thrusting against
the desert sky east of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their sheer drama
draws my eyes every time we pass by on our way to or from Big Bend.
Unaware they were named for their resemblance to church organ pipes,
and finding their name embarrassing, I avoided discussing the Organs
with anyone. So, until a couple of weeks ago, I had never been
there.
But when New Mexico’s Senators Heinrich and Udall introduced a
bill to designate an Organ Mountains/Desert Peaks National Monument
last November, they took on a different aspect. In mid-March, with
an article about them due at the end of the month, we went to
explore.
David had photos from earlier trips, so this trip was for me.
Arriving at the BLM’s A.B. Cox Visitor Center on the west side of
the mountains in mid-afternoon, we were too late to do much of a
hike. Both the visitor center and the road close at 5:00, a
ridiculous time if one wants to photograph, or to hike in the cool
of the late afternoon. As we exited the car, two hikers appeared in
the parking lot, their hike finished. I asked where they’d gone.
“Up to Dripping Springs,” one of them answered, “then over to La
Cueva. It was about six miles.”
We walked partway up the trail toward Dripping Springs as a high
school group from Isleta Pueblo returned from a day’s outing. Most
of the kids practically skipped along. But one boy, who didn’t look
out of shape, was supported by two friends. Suddenly, he simply lay
down on the path. “Just leave me here to die,” he said.
The path, really a gravel road that allows jeeps to travel to the
trail’s end to pick up garbage, check on whatever requires checking
on, is not a difficult one. A gradual climb, it would be a rather
boring walk if the mountains to the east, the hills to the west, the
grassland over which the road lies were not so beautiful. Every so
often a large old tree with a few boulders in front of it forms a
cleared, shady space to rest, making the trail appropriate for any
walker. Because it takes off from the visitor center, all sorts of
people use it. When we walked the entire route two days later, we
encountered several people carrying babies in their arms, or pushing
them in strollers.
I thought leaving the boy there to die might inspire him to
actually stand up and follow his friends down, but they took him
seriously, and did what they could to help. Years ago, hiking in
Austria, I came upon an old couple out for a Sunday walk on a
relatively steep trail. “My husband can go no further,” the woman
said. I asked if there was something I could do, but they said they
would simply rest. The man was old. The trail was steep. They would
turn around and go back down. The man would not die.
I imagined the dripping spring issuing out of damp rock at the
dark, shaded end of a canyon. I imagined an eternal dripping down
rock to end in some perfect pool, a cool, refreshing oasis worth the
walk up the path/road.
Indeed, the spring does issue out of the dark, chocolate
colored tufa that forms this end of the range. Or, once did. Now it
comes from an old faucet inserted into a wall erected to impound
water for the use of the hotel built nearby in the 1870s. There were
trees there, and shade, and a welcome cool after the hot openness of
the path. But it was not a place to linger. I am not fascinated by
faucets.
A trail slightly south of the dam leads a short distance farther
to the site of the old hotel, Van Patten’s Mountain Camp. Rich Las
Cruces residents traveled by stagecoach or private carriage or
horseback to reach this idyllic hotel about 2000 feet above the
desert hot town. Now, empty windows and doorways frame grass and
shrubs in rooms once housing women in long dresses, men in proper
evening clothes. A flowering fruit tree joins the ruins to the
mountains, as if all beauty is connected. Two tables set up under
oaks at the canyon’s edge, a short way from the ruins, offered us a
cool place for lunch, and a way of getting over our annoyance at the
springs.

It isn’t signs of civilization I find dismaying – because I am
fascinated by ruins -- but the rearrangement of natural features.
Once, in Oaxaca, a previous husband and I rented a defunct old mill
for the summer. The bougainvillea draped stone building had been
built over the stream, allowing the stream to continue its natural
flow. Open windows brought inside a constant sound of running water.
Backtracking down the gravel path, past the livery buildings that
served the hotel, we forked away from the return to the visitor
center, walking, instead, up into a desert world of cat’s claw and
sotol extending to the base of the mountains.
From here it is easy to see the split in the range into two
distinct geology features – the dark brown tufa forming the
mountains to the south – the canyon of the hotel and Dripping Spring
– and the white granite of the spired mountains making so dramatic a
skyline in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. Our trail narrowed,
became rockier as it wound its way between the Organ Mts. and La
Cueva Rocks, the 5000 ft. plus rhyolitic outcropping that seems a
kind of echo of the mountains on this – west—side. A broad, grassy
slope runs from the outcropping to the path, while the vegetation
changes to desert trees and flowers not yet in bloom. Rounding La
Cueva Rocks at its northern end, we walked back along it, arriving
at a large cave used by people of the prehistoric Mogollon culture,
and then, again, in the 1860s, by a hermit-healer. We continued down
rocks, crossed a small stream, then paralleled the road back to the
visitor center.
Once we were off the Dripping Springs route, there was no one
else on the trail. I liked the day better then. But I already liked
it better when I arrived at the ruins of the hotel. I liked the old
west feel of the livery station. I liked the place, the rock, the
grass. I liked the hermit , the clouds forming all day in the sky
beyond the Rio Grande, the memory of the ruined hotel, the memory of
what was, the emptiness of time, the sound that becomes silence.
I like the solitude of places people have left forever. I like
the impermanence of what we build. I like the grass growing in
abandoned spaces.
