The winds gusted in, and the clouds jostled for room, and the sky grew dark over Silver City. In this southwestern New Mexico town, calendars that afternoon announced the date as Monday, January 7, 2008, though the majority of the town’s more than 10,000 residents were not inside taking note. Instead, they were at their windows, or on their porches, or carefully venturing outdoors, wondering what exactly was happening with the weather, wondering why it appeared to be raining milk... Read Full Story

A portrait of darkness framed in railroad ties, the entrance to the San Pedro Mine hangs against the stony desert swells of a gray-brown rise of mountains, about thirty miles northeast of Albuquerque.  For more than a century, sounds have carried up from deep within the mine—sounds of picks and clattering rock, of metal wheels on steel tracks, miners’ voices, black-powder blasts and, in 1940, the classical strains of a symphony orchestra. The San Pedro Mountains in which the old mine is... Read Full Story

With the recent premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, residents of the San Luis Valley in north central New Mexico and southern Colorado may find themselves recalling the actual “crystal skull” that once made an appearance in their area.   The San Luis Valley stretches from Colorado south into New Mexico, and from the San Juan Mountains at the valley’s western edge, to the Sangre de Cristo range at its east. The valley is an approximately 150-mile-long by 45-mile... Read Full Story

Most New Mexicans have heard the story of La Llorona—“the weeping woman,” the ditch witch, the mysterious ghost who’s said to wander this state’s arroyos crying for the children she once purposefully drowned. Many people believe she really exists, most probably don’t, but nearly all are in agreement that telling stories of her seems to be a fairly effective method for scaring young children out of playing in ditches.   Another, although lesser-known, New Mexico figure of this sort is El... Read Full Story

The plan involved bats. Millions of bats. Exploding.  In particular, the plan involved the Mexican free-tailed bat—a medium-sized species chosen for its ability to fly while carrying more than twice its weight—and chosen for its vast, millions-sized colonies, which even today form the largest gatherings of mammals on the planet.  In the plan, members of a top-secret World War II-era unit of the U.S. Air Force would net literally millions of Mexican free-tailed bats, from Texas or New Mexico... Read Full Story

The Pecos River begins as snowmelt, high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe. The river, shallow and slow-moving, might very easily be dismissed as a creek, were it located almost anywhere else, but in the arid deserts of New Mexico, it is undeniably, undoubtedly, indisputably a river.   For 926 miles, from the Sangre de Cristos in the north, to Carlsbad in the south, to its junction with the Rio Grande in southwestern Texas, the Pecos River winds steadily southward... Read Full Story

Last month in “My Strange New Mexico,” we explored the unusual history and beliefs of a small religious sect known as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps.  (Click here to read that first installment.)  Inspired in part by the Salvation Army, this little group was born of an alleged 1979 revelation, in which God Himself purportedly commanded Jim and Lila (a.k.a. Deborah) Green, two 1960s hippies with notable tendencies toward the extreme, to found and lead a spiritual... Read Full Story

About nineteen miles south of Las Cruces, near the southern edge of our state, lies the mostly flat, wide-sky, desert town of Berino, New Mexico. There, cotton fields sprawl into the distance from the edges of dirt and gravel roads, the cars of Interstate 10 and the waters of the Rio Grande border the horizons to the east and west, and an old red-brick school building with a bizarre history slumps beside some railroad tracks. In 1993, that little schoolhouse became the compound of a semi... Read Full Story

Consider, if you will, that during the millions of years of humankind’s evolution, development, and dissemination thus far, a being of a much different sort has been evolving as well—on its own at first, beneath the high northern flanks of the Tian Shan Mountains of China and Kazakhstan, and then symbiotically, right alongside us. For millennia, these inhuman entities have coexisted with people in Asia and then Europe, infiltrated the Americas with the coming of the Europeans, and even... Read Full Story

Like a broke-down car on blocks, the city of Lordsburg sits parked in the extreme southwest corner of the state, letting weeds twine up through its center and rust eat away at its edges. Founded in 1880 as a railroad town and today the largest settlement in Hidalgo County, Lordsburg is home to more than 3,000 hardy souls, a thriving methamphetamine trade, and wind and dust storms so intense they will sometimes blow cars and trucks from one lane of Interstate 10 into another. The businesses of... Read Full Story