Silver City

We drove into Silver City on a road that climbed steadily out of the Chihuahuan Desert into piñon and juniper hills, the air noticeably cooler and sharper by the time Bullard Street’s Victorian brick facades came into view. Lia had read that this was once a rough silver- and copper-mining boomtown, home briefly to a young Billy the Kid, and it was easy to picture that history in the ironwork balconies and false-front buildings, even with the storefronts now holding galleries and coffee roasters instead of saloons and assay offices.

Bullard Street and the Big Ditch

Downtown Silver City centers on Bullard Street, an easy walk past art co-ops, a small but excellent regional museum, and murals painted on the sides of century-old brick buildings. Running parallel, oddly, is the Big Ditch — a deep, tree-lined arroyo that was once Main Street itself, washed out entirely by a series of catastrophic floods in the 1890s and left as a sunken linear park. We walked its bottom on a shaded path, looking up at the backs of buildings that had faced the opposite direction a century before, a strange reminder of how thoroughly a flood can rewrite a town’s geography.

Gila Cliff Dwellings

The real reason to make the drive to Silver City lies an hour and a half north, up a slow, winding road into the Gila Wilderness — America’s first designated wilderness area — to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. Lia and I climbed a short, steep trail up to natural caves tucked into a canyon wall, where the Mogollon people built stone rooms some seven hundred years ago, several still roofed with their original timber. Standing inside one of the dwellings, looking out over the same canyon its builders would have seen, was one of the quieter, more affecting moments of our whole New Mexico trip.

Ghost towns and the Gila Wilderness

On the way back we detoured through Pinos Altos, a near-ghost mining camp a few miles from Silver City, where a handful of weathered log buildings and an old opera house survive along a dirt main street, and stopped at an overlook where the Gila Wilderness rolled out in unbroken ridgelines toward the horizon — over 500,000 acres without a single road. It gave Silver City an odd, appealing character: a real town, not just a tourist stop, that happens to sit at the literal edge of one of the wildest, least-visited landscapes left in the American Southwest.

Getting There

Silver City has a small regional airport, but most visitors fly into Albuquerque or El Paso and drive, roughly four hours from Albuquerque via I-25 and US-180, or about three hours from El Paso, Texas. The final approach into town climbs steadily through high desert and forested hills, and a high-clearance vehicle is worth having if you plan to continue on into the Gila Wilderness beyond the cliff dwellings’ paved access road.