by Elizabeth Miller on
IN THE LATE 1800S, the railroad to Cloudcroft delivered tourists from the desert heat. But as travel moved to cars and the railroad lines were abandoned, they left the foundation for a double-track trail system on a generally shallow grade. In 1994, the nonprofit New Mexico Rails-to-Trails Association began the work of converting those rail lines to trails. Gary Truex first visited those routes on vacations with his family. Since moving to Cloudcroft in 2017, he’s come on board as a volunteer and now association president to help steward these trails for parents looking for places to connect with their kids.
I practically raised my daughters on those trails. You can teach kids so much if you just get them out on a trail and take them on a hike.
There’s certainly some switchbacks where you bypass the original railroad bed. But for the most part, they’re just easily hikeable trails.
Because Cloudcroft sits on the western edge of the Sacramento Mountains looking out over the Tularosa Basin, you can be hiking along, come around the bend or make a turn, and you’re in the forest, but to the west it just opens up. You can see the mountains beyond the mountains and White Sands down below.
Maintaining the existing system keeps us pretty busy, because we’re a 100 percent volunteer organization.
When I run into general hikers out on the trail, they start asking me questions. Then they realize, “Okay, in order to put this sign in, you had to haul five bags of concrete and three gallons of water, plus all the materials. You had to hike that stuff two miles up a trail to put this all in.”
I prayed that someday God would let me live up here. I love the mountains. I never get tired of going out on the trails. That keeps me motivated, because I want my kids to be able to take their kids out on these trails. I want parents to be able to get their kids away from cell phones, away from all the distractions of the city, and be able to get them out into nature and just unplug.