Rock Hound State Park & Deming Museum

Our adventures today included hunting for rocks and visiting a very interesting museum.  We packed up lunches, snacks and plenty of water and head a short distance out of Deming, New Mexico, to Rock Hound State Park.  Rock Hound is one of the very few places remaining in the US where visitors are allowed to not only look for unusual rocks but remove them.

Because none of us are geologists, we stopped at the Visitor Center to get an idea of what is just is a rock and what is a really cool rock like a geode, jasper, perlite and many other minerals.  

From the outside of a geode, you would never
guess it contains beautiful crystals inside.

We have a lot of different rocks to look for!

We got our hiking gear and rock-collecting bags (which had also been used for finding shells and shark's teeth in Florida) and headed up the Jasper Trail.

It was a perfect morning for a hike and for looking for rock treasures.  

We would carefully walk off the path in places because the volunteer in the visitor center said that is where we would more likely found some cool rocks.  As we headed up the trail, Chuck got a call from his uncle Donald.  Hi Donald!  

As I walked up the trail a little further, I nearly jumped out of my skin when a couple of lizards ran across the trail in front of me.  These "collared lizards" have the longest legs we have seen on a lizard.  

As we walked on a little further, we saw this lizard sunning in a bush.

Remember the sotol plant we saw at Big Bend and all the sotols we saw at Guadalupe?  We finally got to see a sotol plant in full bloom.  

The bees were buzzing all around it!

The prickly pear cacti were all over these hills at Rock Hound.

We neared the end of Jasper Trail...

...and started the Thunder Egg Trail at the big boulder.

The trail took us further up the hill... 

and Ken even walked up some of the run-offs looking for some rock treasures.

It was fun trying to find unusual rock treasure, but we all enjoyed the beautiful treasures of the gorgeous flowers in bloom.  We have said many times we are SO GLAD we decided to come to these desert areas in the spring.

And the views were amazing!

Florida Mountains (that's really the name!)

Deming, New Mexico, way off in the distance.

As Ken, Chuck and I were nearing the end of Thunder Egg Trail, Bonnie was still looking for some rock treasures.  Can you see her?

The trail ended in the campground and we walked back to the visitor center on the road where the car was parked.

We asked the nice volunteer lady to look at our rocks and see if we had uncovered any treasures.  She was so excited for us and our finds.  She said we had found some nice pieces of jasper and perlite and some other minerals and a couple of the rocks may have been geodes but she couldn't tell for sure unless they were cut open.  

She also recommended that we go to Spring Canyon for our picnic lunch because the temps would be cooler in the canyon.  We took her up on her suggestion.  There was a nice wind and a beautiful view.

We had hoped we might see some of the ipex goats up in the hills but no luck.  

After lunch, we headed back down the curvy road with a 17% grade!

And said good-bye to the Florida Mountains.

We decided to go into Deming to check out the museum that had been recommended to us by a couple of hikers we met in the Guadalupe Mountains and by the nice volunteer lady at Rock Hound.  

You wouldn't think a town this size would have a very big museum but their museum had a collection of just about everything you could imagine:

Room full of old photographs showing Deming's history and citizens.

A huge room full of dolls.
All of our granddaughters would love this room!

Room full of Native American artifacts like these old moccasins.

We had been told this museum had everything in it and they were right!  There was room after room after room of displays of everything you could imagine.  We only had an hour to go through the whole museum because it was closing at 4 pm but could easily see where it could take at least half a day to see everything.  With this museum, Deming has their own version of the Smithsonian!

 And of course, they also had this amazing display of geodes.

And best of all the museum is free!  They completely rely on donations.  After leaving the museum, we went to the Red Roof Rock Shop to see if any of the rocks we had collected at Rock Hound State Park might be geodes.  They didn't think any of our rocks were geodes and they said geodes were getting harder to find.  But they did have tons of rocks!

We returned back to the campground and enjoyed a nice grilled dinner together.  The weather was perfect and we even enjoyed sitting outside for awhile.  Tomorrow, we're going to explore Las Cruces.