Editor’s note: This is the 3rd post in this blog series but covers our 4th day. Yesterday we were at White Sands National Park, and I want to give a bit of a longer feature blog post to a new national park visited for both Elizabeth and myself. Plus we got back late.
I woke up in a different room than the night before for the 5th straight morning. Freedom was the knowledge that we were staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Alamogordo for one more night, so I didn’t need to immediately pack up after waking up. It was nice to have Elizabeth in the room with me, as well. And a third bonus: we didn’t have to leave until close to 8:45 since our first stop of the day wouldn’t be open until 9:00 anyway.
What was our first stop of the day, you ask? None other than one of the Seven Wonders of New Mexico (as voted on by me): McGinn’s Pistachioland. From the name, you can deduce that Pistachioland is a huge orchard of pistachio trees in the desert floor north of Alamogordo. Apparently pistachio trees love hot, dry climates, which is the only way you can thrive just downwind of White Sands. What the name doesn’t capture fully is just how much the McGinn family has capitalized on their cash crop. They have a huge shop, ice cream parlor, give guided tours of the farm, and also have the World’s Largest Pistachio on display out front.
Elizabeth and I got our pistachio pin and magnets, as well as a bag of Habanero Limon pistachios. We also got a couple of giant scoops of pistachio ice cream despite it being just 9:30 am. There was no way I could ever finish mine, but Elizabeth said she had “never met an ice cream cone she couldn’t finish”, and she proceeded to fit action to words. Fortunately I had my mom to help me finish my ice cream. Surprisingly, this was her first-ever time having pistachio, which is basically my favorite flavor. I passed along my recipe for Ninja Creami pistachio in the spirit of evangelizing my love.
From Pistachioland to Ruidoso is about an hour drive and most of it feels straight uphill. Much like the day before, it was stunning how quickly the scenery changed from chaparral and desert wasteland to a forest of big Ponderosa pines that wouldn’t be out place 500 miles north of it. People have told me over and over again that Ruidoso is a stunning area; now I got to see it in real time.
The other thing that Elizabeth and I got to experience in real-time was the horror at Ruidoso. The town sits at 6,700 feet in the lovely Lincoln National Forest with nearby Sierra Blanca Peak sitting almost 12,000 feet high. In 2024, multiple fires started in canyons above and below town and threatened to trap the residents + tourist population in town. Though the fires were eventually contained with downtown being saved, the consequences have been dire. Burn scars now sit above town in multiple directions and turn into flash flooding chutes every time a monsoon thunderstorm arrives. Multiple fatalities occurred in 2025 from the flooding and this looks to continue unabated into the future.
Speaking of burn scars, the Cedar Creek area just north of downtown has a nice little sprawl of trails for hikers, bikers, and equestrians built into a hillside. At the bottom of the hill next to the road, the creek trickled with the last vestiges of a historically early snowmelt in New Mexico. A group of 10-20 elk lolled about in the shade of the big pines alongside the water where they could easily access food and drink without having to beat the heat of the day. They did not care about our presence whatsoever.
We ended up hiking a 4 mile loop that attacked the Cedar Creek Ridge with some early switchbacks, then snaked northward just below the ridgetop, before making a long curlicue back down the slope and southward near the creek. AllTrails had it marked at only 400 feet of elevation gain, which led my dad and me to erroneously call it a “flat” trail. No: 400 feet uphill is still 400 feet uphill, especially when all of that occurs in the first mile or so. It wasn’t quite as hot up here as it had been in Palo Duro or White Sands the previous two days, but I was still sweating more than expected by that mile mark. It didn’t help that the cover of big Ponderosas was suddenly cut off by the burn scar of one of those recent wildfires.
I have no desire to ever see an inferno strong enough to melt a sign like this.
There are admittedly a few upsides of hiking through a burn scar, though. Foremost among them is the increased sightline. You could see one heck of a long way across the town.
It was also neat to see some of the young growth already beginning to poke back through the burn zone. I don’t know how this year’s horrendous snowpack + potentially bad monsoon will affect things, but there were already tiny little pine shoots racing up the hillside. There were flowers just beginning to emerge, and I bet in a few weeks Ruidoso’s burn scars will be awash in wildflowers.
The final advantage to hiking in a burn zone was simple: it gives you a better chance of coaxing a breeze out of a hot day.
We were all a little footsore and careworn after 4 miles that sounded so easy on Alltrails. The end of the loop crossed over Cedar Creek, which gave me a chance to dunk my hat in the water and get a fresh drip of snowmelt onto my head. (Note to self: do not put wet hat in lap if you’re wearing khakis. You WILL look like you wet yourself). Plenty of water at the car helped revive spirits part of the way. For the rest, we headed into downtown Ruidoso in search of lunch. The first couple of restaurants we searched seemed either nonexistent or were difficult to find, but fortunately an open-air food court saved the day for everyone. Please enjoy the very nutritious meal Elizabeth and I had.
Being downtown was convenient for getting some gift shopping in over the next hour or so. The crowds in the gift shop area were rather thick, and I shudder to think what it would have looked like had it not been the very last day of Spring Break. I was pretty relieved to leave the downtown area of Ruidoso behind. Seems kind of weird given how much I love downtowns like Estes Park or Jackson, but maybe it’s just the dissonance of being one of thousands of tourists lined up just yards away from the riverside where entire mobile home parks were basically swept away by flooding. Downtown Ruidoso gets a C- from me.
You know what doesn’t get a C- from me? The Winter Park Mountain Coaster. I really, really thought it would; my mom wanted to ride the mountain coaster so bad, but when we got there all we could see was a chintzy little 25-foot lift up and over a hill, and then riders coming back down the hill pretty slowly at the end. If you’re going to pay $25 a person to ride a mountain coaster, then I needed to see some more fireworks. But reluctantly I agreed to do so with my mom and Elizabeth, each of us in our own cars (Elizabeth when I asked if she wanted to ride tandem: “No. God no.” Apparently she remembers the alpine slide in Glacier).
It was with delight that I waved to my dad below as I crested that little 25-foot lift and realized: this was only a tiny, tiny chunk of a lift hill that actually went up to the top of the whole mountain.
The lift alone probably took 3 minutes. My mom slowly chugged along 300 feet back, and somewhere Elizabeth was doing the same. A disembodied voice from inside the coaster car told me to push down on the levers to slow down (as if) and pull back to go faster (that’s more like it). Then I was all the way at the top, teetering for a second, beginning a slow curve to the right past the lookout station up top. I looked at the ride operator and gave him a “Kowabunga”, and then gravity was in full control.
This was nothing like the alpine slide in Glacier. That one had a lot more friction and no tracks, so there was legitimate risk of crashing; it makes sense that the ride operators would make it hard for me to exceed 15 mph. This one gets up to 25 mph at top speed and takes almost no time to reach it. I went rocketing past my mom with a “WOOOOOOOOOOO”, then skyrocketed into a tight curve with another “WOOOOOOO”, then floored the speed with everything I had on the next straightaway with another “WOOOOOOOO”. The car’s speaker played incongruosuly cheery music as I blasted into a full 360-degree turn, then blasted under Elizabeth who was still chugging up the hill. Right as I figured out the smoothest brake-accelerator system (you almost literally had to brake into corners), the ride was over, and I was screaming to a halt in front of my dad at the finish. What a thrill!
My mom came screaming in, chortling with joy like me, and Elizabeth came in at an impressive clip of her own, face awash in terror. I think her mountain coaster career may have ended on this day in Ruidoso.
The sun was still pretty high in the sky after this adventure, but I had had enough of downtown Ruidoso. Elizabeth made the suggestion of the day, saying we should head over to Cloudcroft now in time for dinner. That would get us much closer to Alamogordo and our hotel while also being a scenic drive, and we could do some more gift shopping + see the Mexican Canyon Trestle. It didn’t initially feel like the suggestion of the day because the road between Ruidoso and Cloudcroft was winding and at times terrifying. There was a huge ascent at the end (so high up we actually passed a few sad piles of snow, a reminder that Cloudcroft is a ski town and normally this is just when they close operations for the spring.
At 8,700 feet, the air was cooler here than in Ruidoso. The town was also much quieter. There was another main street with gift shops and outfitters and a bakery (Rich found this one really fast), but with like 20% of the tourist load. In other words, it was my kind of town. Despite being a Sunday evening, everyone kept telling us to get over to Cloudcroft Brewery for dinner because it was clam chowder evening and you don’t want to miss that. If the locals give you that advice, you take it!
But first, a trip just below town to Mexican Canyon to see the railroad trestle. Built in the era when loggers were cutting down the trees of the Sacramentos and needed an easy way to get them to the plains below, the railroad between Alamogordo and Cloudcroft turned into a tourist haven for folks trying to escape that harsh New Mexico summer. The trestle across Mexican Canyon is the final one standing of dozens that originally stood on this impressive little route. It’s a neat spot to see, with a viewing platform that lets you see from this lofty elevation all the way to the plain and the White Sands beyond. But mostly: railroad trestle.
Now it was late enough to go back up into town and get the dang clam chowder that everyone was raving about. My parents said it lived up to the hype; I know the pizza Elizabeth and I split (with hatch chiles, of course; you can’t escape them in this state) was pretty good but only pretty good, but the beer was phenomenal.
Hell, there was a distillery right next door where Rich got to talk to the owner and get a flight of whiskey to bring back to the table. He was not talked into the $200 bottle to bring home to impress his buddies though. Gotta work harder than that, Cloudcroft Distillery.
Could this day have possibly fit anything more in? From the zaniness of Pistachioland, to the stoicism of Cedar Creek, to the chaos of Ruidoso, to the intensity of the Mountain Coaster, to the charm of Cloudcroft, it had been a full tour de force of southern New Mexico. I loved it. I think we all loved it. The only thing better would have been an incredible sunset coming back down the steep canyon into Alamogordo to finish the night.
Oh, wait!
Unforgettable day.
