Dripping Springs

One of the pleasures of traveling is finding places that are beautiful or interesting. In the U.S., some of these places have been protected by local, state or federal governments to conserve nature, preserve history and viewscapes, and for public recreation. We found one of these places on our way back to Mexico.

Organ Mountains - torrey mountain yucca (foreground) and soaptree yucca

We left northern Colorado in a snowstorm and stopped in Las Cruces, New Mexico for a couple days to collect the remaining documents we needed to complete our tax returns and plan our trip down the Pacific Coast of mainland Mexico. With some free time, we went looking for hikes in the Organ Mountains east of Las Cruces and found Dripping Springs Natural Area. It’s managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and has a small visitor center at 5,000 feet and more than four miles of hiking trails.

Rising from the Chihuahuan Desert, the Organ Mountains are the “crown jewel of the southern Rockies” with steep-sided canyons, granite spires and perennial springs. Organ Needle, the highest point, is about 9,000 feet (link). 

Organ Mountains and long-spined opuntia (foreground)

The Spanish explorer Don Oñate made note of the mountains in his journal in 1598 (link). Early Spanish explorers called them Sierra de los Organos for the spires that resemble pipes of an organ (link). The Organ Mountains are home to over 800 species of vascular plants, ranging from creosote bush, agaves and acacias at lower elevations to junipers and oaks at intermediate elevations to Ponderosa pine and mountain mahogany at higher elevations.  Sixty species of reptiles, 185 species of birds and 80 species of mammals have been recorded (link). Five endemic plants and four endemic mollusks are found there (link).

Sotol

The visitor center was run by a retired couple volunteering for BLM. Before we went on our hike, the woman told us the story of the hermit of Dripping Springs. In 1869, Agostini-Justiniani, 69 years old, trained as a priest and descended from Italian nobility, lived in La Cueva (The Cave). El Ermitaño (The Hermit) was associated with a penitential order and believed to have healing powers. On Friday evenings he lit a fire in front of the cave to let his friends in town know he was alive; one Friday there was no fire. They found him dead with a knife in his back lying face down on his crucifix wearing a penitent’s metal girdle. He's buried in the cemetery in Mesilla south of Las Cruces. The murderer was never discovered (link, link). More recently, excavations in La Cueva produced artifacts from prehistoric cultures inhabiting the area as early as 5,000 B.C. (link).

La Cueva is a natural cave in volcanic tuff

Colonel Eugene Van Patten settled in Los Cruces in 1872. He fought with the Confederacy in the Battle of Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe and later worked for the Butterfield Stage Line (owned by his uncle) in Mesilla. He built Van Patten’s Mountain Camp at 6,000 feet in the Organ Mountains in the 1870s. It had 16 rooms, a dining room and a concert hall and was a popular resort at the turn of the century. Pancho Villa and Pat Garrett, who shot Billy the Kid, stayed there (link).

Van Patten's Mountain Camp

Van Patten's Mountain Camp

Van Patten built the livery to serve the wagons and horses that brought guests to the resort hotel from Las Cruces, about 17 miles away. Guests began to arrive at the hotel by automobile in the early 1900s. The hotel stopped operating in the 1920s (link).

The livery

Van Patten went broke in 1917 and Dripping Springs was sold to Dr. Nathan Boyd, a physician and homesteader on an adjacent piece of land. Boyd was involved in large engineering projects and came to Las Cruces to promote, design and build a dam on the Rio Grande that would reduce the impact of floods. When his wife developed tuberculosis, Boyd converted Dripping Springs to a sanatorium and built housing for patients. After Boyd, Dripping Springs changed hands several times and was scavenged for building materials. Eventually the property was purchased by the Nature Conservancy and transferred to BLM (link).

Boyd's sanatorium

Boyd's sanatorium

For the past decade, a coalition of civic groups, conservation organizations and individuals has urged Congress to formally protect the Organ Mountains. In 2012, U.S. Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich (New Mexico) introduced legislation to create the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument (link).

Snow in the Organ Mountains

By late afternoon, clouds had gathered over the peaks and it began to snow. The small flakes evaporated before they hit the ground (virga), but the message was clear – time to head back to Mexico.

Dripping Springs; note the pipe at the top and the rocks that fill in a natural cleft and create a small reservoir 

To see the Organ Mountains in bloom, check out this link.