I read Bottomless Lake State Park and thought “these lakes must be really deep. I read the name to Ash and she looked at me funny and said, “topless, maybe – not bottomless”. Ok, well maybe that didn’t happen – but we did find a great State Park to camp at and got to visit Roswell!

Bottomless State Park

Bottomless Lake State Park is actually a series of cave-ins due to a peculiarly specific set of geological circumstances that creates this cave system that is full of water with a weak layer of substrata over it. Makes for some beautiful landscape.

We were fortunate enough to score a location that was shaded by the bluff in the morning, so it took longer for the trailer to get up to a nice baking temperature. We still have no awning – thank you high desert winds!

The campground was great – during the day. Then it lured you out into the evening for fantastic sunsets and released literal hordes of little vampires to feast upon your blood. Bottomline at Bottomless Lake State Park, enjoy it during the daytime. The mosquitoes are horrible after dusk.

There are a couple of trails, we saw some nice examples of pinion pines, young mesquite (barely even 50 years old, wee little babies) and a LOT of very fast lizards. The water in the lakes was beautiful, the main lake at the campground (Lea Lake) was so blue it was almost another color entirely.

Almost forgot! Pre-Bottomless State Park

We managed to work a short side trip in on our way to the Park. We stopped at White Sands New Mexico. It’s a surreal experience. There’s a gift shop and a small nature exhibit that helps explain the creation and ongoing formation of the giant, powdery white sand dunes.

Roswell

Ok, the obvious – Roswell is very well known in the US as a touristy kitchy place themed about aliens based on the new report that came out in 1947 regarding a crashed alien ship that was quickly retracted by the US military. Of course we had to go to several gift shops, the UFO Museum and some weirdly cool retro walking exhibits.

But wait! There’s more, you know we had to eat something cool!

We were walking the main strip and noticed a large Mexican restaurant on one of the corners, Los Cerritos. It was quickly decided that we would have dinner there. We wandered in in the early afternoon, only to discover that we had stumbled into Taco Tuesday night as it just started out! 99 cent tacos until you tap out. These are large, over stuffed hard shell tacos. It was fantastic!

The following day, we wanted to see some of the rest of Roswell. There is a rich heritage of cattle driving (and rustling!), a large college and great frisbee golf course that it was way to hot to try out!

We stumbled upon an old school steak restaurant that we knew had to be dinner. The Cattle Baron is a steakhouse from an older generation. There is a large bottomless salad bar – with the french dressing I like, orange not red (which is apparently “old person salad dressing” according the Sierra), great steaks cooked to order, whiskey and shoot – what else could you want?

Wrapping up a relaxing adventure

For our family, hiking, eating locally, seeing things we haven’t seen before – there just isn’t much more we could ask for. We spent one last relaxing evening and rolled out early. It was supposed to be triple digits by about 10 am and we are heading into Texas! Stay tuned for our next adventure! If you missed anything, check out the archives accessed from our front page! Feel free to leave us a comment!