Tag Archive for 'Organ Mountains'

On Walkabout On: The Organ Mountain’s Dripping Springs Trail – Part 2

Published on July 8, 2009 in Southwest America. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Prior Posting: Dripping Springs Trail – Part 1
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As my wife and I continued down the Dripping Springs Trail in New Mexico’s Organ Mountains, the high rocky peaks of this great mountain range towered over us as we approached them:

The trail entered into a scenic valley at the base of the rocky peaks where the trail’s namesake, the Dripping Springs could be seen:

The spring was living up to its name because all it was doing was dripping.  You can see in the picture that at the base of the spring a retaining wall was built to collect water.  This wall was built in 1892 by Eugen Van Patten to provide water for his nearby Dripping Springs Hotel.  After all these years his wall is still standing though it has since been filled with sediment and no longer holds any water. 

Here is how Dripping Springs looks when there is enough rain to make the waterfall flow:

I hope I get to see the waterfall flow like that one day.  Anyway just a short walk further up the trail is the ruins of the old resort that once operated here:

The Dripping Springs Resort was built in 1870’s by Eugene Van Patten:

Van Patten first came out west from New York in the late 1850’s when John Butterfield invited him to come work for his company the Butterfield Stage Line.  When the Civil War broke out Van Patten joined the Confederacy as a Colonel and fought in the Battle of Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe. 

In 1872 Van Patten returned to Las Cruces bought the land at the base of the mountain and began constructing a 14 room resort.  The resort was constructed at an altitude of 6,000 feet, which was 2,000 feet higher than Las Cruces.  Van Patten was married to a local Piro Indian girl and employed a number of boys from this tribe to work at the hotel.  The boys brought water every day from Dripping Springs for the hotel guests to use. 


Reservoir above the resort that also collected water for the guests to use.

The boys also put on Indian dancing shows at night for the guests.  Initially Van Patten had much success with his resort and in 1906 he expanded the hotel to include another 18 more rooms.  Over the years a number of famous people stayed at the resort such as Pat Garret and Pancho Villa. 


As I passed this outhouse I couldn’t help, but wonder whether Pancho Villa ever took a crap here?

According to this posting on the El Paso Community College website, Eugene Van Patten was a very well respected member of the Las Cruces community while operating the resort:


Van Patten in front of Dripping Springs in 1897.

At one time, Van Patten owned most of the land on which Las Cruces was built. In an interview, World War II veteran Santiago Brito, 92, nephew of Van Patten’s daughter Emilia, said that Van Patten purchased the land and later sold parcels at low prices to friends and family. 

According to a 1949 Las Cruces newspaper article by Joe Priestly, Van Patten gave a large tract of land he had obtained from the federal government to the Pueblo Indians now living in the village of Tortugas located a few miles south of Las Cruces. Brito agreed that Van Patten was always very kind and generous to the local Indians, and Van Patten himself was married to a Piro Indian.

Van Patten provided funds for the first Catholic Church in Las Cruces as well as for Loretto Academy , founded in 1870, many years before the school of the same name was established in El Paso. In 1885, he was elected sheriff and later became a U. S. marshal for New Mexico, Arizona and West Texas.

However, by 1917 Van Patten experienced financial difficulties and sold the resort to a Dr. Nathan Boyd who homestead on a piece of land near the resort.  Dr. Boyd studied medicine at Stanford University before moving to Australia to practice medicine there.  Even here in the remote desert of New Mexico an American connection to Australia can be found.


Dr. Boyd’s homestead at Dripping Springs.

In Australia Dr. Boyd married the daughter of a wealthy Australian engineering company.  He and his wife moved to Las Cruces in the 1890’s to promote the building of a dam on the Rio Grande River by his father-in-law’s company.  He bought a parcel of land next to Van Patten’s resort to construct a homestead on while he worked on the dam project.  However, soon after construction of the dam began the company was stopped from proceeding due to complaints filed by local ranchers who’s land would have been inundated by the dam.  After Boyd used up his finances paying lawyers to fight the government to get the dam built, the government went ahead and built the Elephant Butte dam themselves in 1916.  To make matters worse Boyd’s wife came down with tuberculosis.  He decided to the dry air in Las Cruces would be good for his wife and decided to stay and convert the resort into a sanitorium for other sufferers of tuberculosis. 


As I got higher up on the rocks I got a better view of the area to include being able to see the trail that leads up into this scenic valley.

Like Van Patten before him, Dr. Boyd suffered further financial difficulties and sold the property in 1922.  The property changed hands a few more times before being bought by a wealthy rancher A.B. Cox in the 1950’s.  The Cox family turned the land into a succesful cattle ranch property, but due to the number of unique species on the property, the government was able to convince the Cox family to sell the land to the Nature Conservancy which eventually sold the land to the Bureau of Land Management in 1988.  Ever since then the land has remained open for the public to enjoy. 

With views like this it is great that the public can now enjoy this land like the many resort guests did a hundred years ago:

To access Dripping Springs from Las Cruces just exit I-10 on University Avenue and then follow University Avenue toward the Organ Mountains to reach the recreation area.  A trip to the mountains is definitely one of the top day trips in Las Cruces.

On Walkabout On: The Organ Mountain’s Dripping Springs Trail – Part 1

Published on July 7, 2009 in Southwest America. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Just north of my present home in El Paso, Texas and just across the state line is the scenic college town of Las Cruces, New Mexico:

There are plenty of things to see and do in Las Cruces, but the one thing site that over shadows all others in this town is without a doubt the Organ Mountains:

The Organ Mountains, so called because they look like a church organ, tower over the city to the east and are a sight that new visitors to the city are always in awe of.  Well these mountains were a place where my wife and I decided to go a take a hike at recently.  Las Cruces is only about a 45 minute drive from where we live and the drive down Dripping Springs Road to the mountains from Las Cruces is about another 15 minute drive:

Here is a Google Earth image of this spectacular and rugged mountain range:

The Organ Mountains is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and they keep a visitor center open at the base of the mountains at the end of the Dripping Springs Road:

The visitor center is actually quite well done and has a number of displays depicting the areas history, wildlife, and plant life that is well worth checking out.  Even from the parking lot of the visitor center, there is a spectacular view of the surrounding Rio Grande river valley:

I just find it amazing how much water flows down this river in the middle of a desert.  Even more amazing is how little of this water is left once the Rio Grande reaches the border between the US and Mexico.

The visitor center is also the hub for a number of trails that lead off into the surrounding park land.  One short trail from the visitor center leads over to a rock formation known as La Cueva:

This rock formation has a cave that for nearly 7,000 years local Apache Indian tribes used for shelter.  The top of the cave is still black with smoke from these fires. The caves most infamous resident however was not Indians, but rather a monk by the name of Giovanni Maria Agostini, know to local folks as “El Ermitano”…the Hermit.

Agostini the son of a rich Italian family who became a monk and eventually traveled around the Americas before joining a wagon train that took him to Las Cruces.  Agostini eventually decided to move into the cave at La Cueva and became known as a valuable healer in the community.  Many locals worried about the monk living alone in the isolated cave, but to ease their worries Agostini promised to light a fire every night letting people know he was okay.  In the spring of 1869 a fire failed to appear and the next morning when a local man went to check on Agostini, he found him murdered with a knife in his back.  Agostini is buried in a local cemetery and the culprit of his murder was never found.

On this visit to the Organ Mountains my wife and I planned to hike the Dripping Springs Trail where at the end of the trail the remains of an old sanitorium and mountain resort still remain.  The entire length of the hike would be about 4 miles which makes for a pleasant day hike.  Here is the start of the Trail:

The start of the trail also had a sign warning hikers about the dangers of hiking in the park:

My wife and I had no intention of rock climbing during this trip and were going to simply follow the trail thus avoiding any potential dangerous situations on the high rocks.  Here is a Google Earth image of the Dripping Springs Trail we planned to follw:

Along the way on the trail my wife and I continuously saw these little lizard running off into the bush as we neared them on the trail:

Better having these guys running around us than rattlesnakes, that’s for sure.  Anyway continued down the trail and were impressed not only by the high rocky peaks of the mountains, but the variety of Chihuahuan Desert, plant life that surrounded us:

The yucca plants all had these high stems sticking out of them in order to spread their seeds around:

These yucca trees actually reminded me of how the fern trees in Australia reproduce. The lower reaches of the Organ Mountains even had some large trees:

Further up the mountain at higher altitudes Ponderosa Pine trees can actually be found.  Of course since this is a desert there was some giant sized cactus, but not as much as you would think:

The desert also had a number of colorful flowers that if you look closely, you can see this bird was using for shade:

Anyway as the trail continued on closer and closer to the rocky peaks of the mountain we walked across a very lush grassland that actually served as grazing land for the Cox Ranch before the government acquired the land:

As we neared the mountains we both could not keep our eyes off the massive rocky peaks ahead of us:

Before the trail enters into a rocky valley where the trail ends, there is an old stable that used to house the horses that were used to bring visitors up to the now abandoned resort at the end of the trail:

There are no more horses here now a days to see, but the view of the surrounding Rio Grande basin is still as good as it was back then:

From here the trail ascended into the interior of a rocky valley where one of the first resorts in New Mexican history was established.

Next Posting: Dripping Springs Trail – Part 2