theboondork's RV blog

Conflicting news?

4/17/2021

Show the Elephant some love, and click the pics of Elephant Butte State Park.

Last nights sunset.

I've extended my stay here at Elephant Butte State Park for another three days. That apparently is the sort of thing you have to do when you're living in almost full state parks and being required to make reservations. I guess I'll get used to that eventually... But I sure hope I don't have to.

Here's some information that I just found in the fine print on one of New Mexico's State Parks websites.....

"Beginning April 16th, camping opportunities will be expanded in many parks. Some parks will now allow camping without an online reservation, but reservations ahead of time are still strongly encouraged. Limited dispersed camping in undeveloped sites will be allowed in some parks."

Now some of that is new information that I got even after talking to the Elephant Butte honchos yesterday morning. I knew they were going to start dispersed camping this morning, but allowing "some" camping without online reservations is something no one mentioned to me. It would appear to me that if they're going to allow "some" camping without reservations, it would make the most sense to allow dispersed camping [boondocking] without reservations because there's usually plenty of those sites available.

I think something that is really going to bother me, if it ever comes down to it, is when I have to make a reservation for a free boondocking site. The only time I've ever seen boondocking sites anywhere near full is during the biggest of holidays, and I normally get to a boondocking area very early to avoid that. But now I may have to make a reservation for a free boondocking site, and pay the reservation company $12 just so I can stay in a free boondocking site which is only full three or four holidays of the year.

I haven't given any thought yet as to where I'm going to go from here but I can't put that off for too long since reservations get more difficult to find. I need to stay in this general area because the weather is just about perfect here. And it's still early enough in the year that if I get up too high in altitude it might be too cold.

So what I want to do is stay south of New Mexico's Storrie Lake state Park, in Las Vegas, until late May, so I can stay at Storrie Lake for a week or so and then be back in Denver in a few days. But I have to be a little careful getting that far north because I have been snowed on at Storrie Lake State Park in late May more than once.

Theboondork

Cholla Cactus

Sunset at elephant Butte state Park.

2 Comments

OFM

4/17/2021 04:30:27 pm

Thousands of acres of free camping on BLM and Forest Service land down in that area. Hwy 137 has huge tracts of free NFS camping I have personally checked out. in the past. Have fun.

Tom

4/17/2021 06:07:29 pm

I don't recall anyone asking me before why I like New Mexico State Parks so much. But since you did, here's my long-winded answer.

You are correct, similar to Arizona, there's a lot of government land that you can camp on in New Mexico. And I've stayed on some of it myself, mostly back in the day when I was traveling with a go anywhere, pop-up slide-in camper on my truck.

But when I went full-time and started pulling a somewhat rotund trailer around, I decided that some of the roads I was having to go on to get to these boondocking areas was going to be tough on the trailer and the truck. Not that it couldn't do it, I just wasn't sure how long it was going to last while doing it. And that's when I started looking into the nonresident annual camping permit, and decided that for a couple of reasons it was a real bargain.

I found that most of the state parks in New Mexico were relatively close to a town which meant that I could go back and forth to town whenever I felt like it without burning up more diesel fuel than the trip was worth.

Since a lot of the New Mexico State Parks are near, or directly on water, and a lot of folks bring their boats to these lakes the roads are kept in pretty good shape so I don't have to spend much time bouncing down a beat up dirt road.

But I think the main thing that attracted me to the New Mexico state parks was, unlike Colorado State Parks, New Mexico State Parks usually have boondocking. Which for a modest fee, I can pull into, relatively close to town, on a paved road, and without filling out any paperwork, or stuffing envelopes full of money, I can choose a spot to my liking and sit there for two weeks if I so desire.

So the unique thing about New Mexico State Parks is the boondocking. I'm not sure how many other places have boondocking as part of their state park system but I don't recall seeing any in Colorado, and the ever-increasing cost of going to the Colorado parks keeps me returning to the national forest areas for boondocking.

Tom.... Having toooo much fun adapting to a different New Mexico State Park system.

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