Las Cruces

We arrived in Las Cruces at chile-roasting season, when the whole city smells of scorched green pepper skins drifting from wire-mesh roasters set up outside every grocery store and roadside stand. The Mesilla Valley has grown chile for centuries, and locals argue about Hatch versus valley-grown varieties with the same seriousness other places reserve for sports rivalries. Lia bought a bag straight off a roaster still smoking, and we ate green chile on everything for the rest of the trip — burgers, eggs, even, at one memorable roadside stand, on a scoop of vanilla ice cream that somehow worked.

Old Mesilla’s plaza

A few miles from downtown, the village of Old Mesilla preserves its 19th-century adobe plaza almost intact, its low brown buildings now holding galleries, a winery, and the old courthouse where Billy the Kid was tried and sentenced to hang in 1881, before famously escaping the jail across the way. We wandered the plaza at dusk, mariachi drifting from a restaurant patio, the San Albino Church’s twin bell towers catching the last orange light, and it was easy to picture the stagecoaches that once rattled through here on the Butterfield Overland Mail route. A shop owner selling Day of the Dead folk art told us Mesilla briefly served as the capital of the Confederate Arizona Territory during the Civil War — one of many odd footnotes layered into this small, unhurried plaza.

Into the Organ Mountains

East of the city, the Organ Mountains erupt from the desert floor in a jagged spine of granite spires, sharp enough to explain the name, and we hiked into Dripping Springs, a canyon trail leading to the ruins of a 19th-century health resort and, later, a hideout used by outlaws working the surrounding badlands. The trail climbed through ocotillo and yucca before the canyon walls closed in and a spring-fed pool appeared, genuinely dripping from an overhang, cool air pooling around it like the mountain’s own air conditioning. Looking back west from the trailhead, the whole Mesilla Valley spread out green against the surrounding desert, chile fields and pecan orchards fed by a river that, improbably, keeps this stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert farming productively after four centuries.

Getting There

Las Cruces International Airport handles only limited traffic, so most visitors fly into El Paso, Texas, about 45 minutes south, and drive up on Interstate 10. The city also sits directly on Interstate 25, roughly three and a half hours south of Albuquerque, and the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument and White Sands National Park both make easy day trips once you’re settled in town.