Bottomless Lakes

We're having a great time in New Mexico. The weather has been mostly hot with temps in the 80's and 90's. It's very dry so it's not too bad but we're slowly making our way to the northern parts of New Mexico for some cooler temps. We left Hobbs and spent a week in Artesia, mostly just to wait for our mail to arrive at the campground where we were staying. I'm really not crazy about private campgrounds but they have their advantages sometimes. We were glad to leave there and head to the first of the many New Mexico State Parks we plan to visit.

Before we left Artesia, we took a walk around the downtown area. I'm always impressed by the efforts these small, Southwestern towns make to bring some art and beauty to their city. Artesia was no exception. They had a series of statues throughout the town paying tribute to the Loving-Goodnight Cattle Drives.

The best part of our walk downtown came when we discovered a little park sandwiched in between two buildings. It was a delightful space with murals, fountains, trees and beautiful ceramic tiles.

Here's a picture I like of Larry looking at one of the murals. I wanted to include this to show that he likes this kind of thing, too, and that I honestly don't just drag him to all this artsy stuff.

We left Artesia last Thursday (after our mail finally arrived!) and drove to Bottomless Lakes State Park near Roswell. We love it here. After a week in a crowded RV park it was so nice to get back into the privacy and beauty of a state park. We've been here a week and plan to stay another week, at least. The lakes here are actually giant sinkholes which fill up from an underground water source. The deepest is around 90 feet. They got their names from the cowboys who use to use their saddle ropes to measure how deep the water was. When they came to this area, they tied several ropes together and still never found the bottom so they believed they were bottomless. The campground is located at the largest of these: Lea Lake. We can see Lea Lake from the front window of our motorhome.

Here are some more pictures of the lake and hill surrounding the park...

I went for a bike ride at sunset the other night and snapped this picture of the lake as the sun was setting...

This final picture was taken of the whole lake from on top of the big hill that you can see in some of the pictures.

We love it here so much that we have hardly left the park since our arrival. It is about 17 miles from here to Roswell and we took a trip there yesterday for groceries. We plan to return to check out some of the UFO stuff. We also plan to explore this park some more. It's very big and we want to check out the other lakes and look for a special type of quartz that is found around here called Pecos Diamonds.

I hope you enjoyed today's pictures! Thanks for stopping by.