Saturday, November 11, 2006
Sumner Lake SP, Ft Sumner, NM - Nov 9-10
This is a quite pretty campground by Sumner Lake, which is a nice enough stop for a night or two. The park has water & electric sites for $13/night, "improved" sites (shade shelter & fire ring on a numbered site) for $10 -- these were all closed for the season, or "unimproved" (go down a dirt road & find a level spot) for $8. We would have been quite happy in an unimproved area, but the ditzy campground host made it sound so unpleasant that we set up in a hookup site and didn't check out the other areas until the next day.Birds were plentiful around this whole area, and we spotted our first northern waterthrush. There were also abundant Mule deer grazing everywhere at all times of day.
We visited the town of Ft Sumner and found it to have a fairly cute downtown area with many attractive murals. We had planned to visit the Bosque Redondo Memorial, about 5 miles southeast of town, which marks the site of the former Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. In 1864 Kit Carson marched a group of about 9000 Navajos from Fort Defiance, AZ, to this reservation, a grueling ordeal that is now known as "The Long Walk". 
This 400-mile forced march was very hard on them and many died either along the way or at the fort, where they were held for 5 years, enduring not only disease & crop failure, but attacks by other Native Americans. They were finally allowed to return to their homes in 1868. The admission price of $5/person seemed a bit steep for something that we already knew much about, so we passed.
We did visit the grave (supposedly the REAL one) of Billy the Kid and several of his cohorts. After reading his bio, you have to wonder why so much attention is paid to this psychopathic little punk.# posted by Doug and Willie @ 11:11 PM 
