City of Rock State Park, NM

It was pretty chilly this morning, even the road runners weren't running.

Our field trip today was to Hatch, New Mexico... the Chile Capital of the World!  Word is the New Mexico chilies are better than the chilies grown in any other state.  They hold a big Chile Festival in September each year here.  Hatch is just a tiny town, but they grown and sell a heckuva lotta peppers here.

This is a field of peppers ready for the picking.

 

That field of peppers was across the road from and belongs to Gilly.  We stopped at this roadside stand to see what there was to see.  Gilly is a very likable and interesting man...he is passionate about peppers and explained to us how to use the dried peppers that we bought from him.. and went on to explain more about peppers than we really needed to know.   But we liked him and if we're here again next year we will stop in to see him and, of course, purchase more peppers.   You can find several other roadside stands like this in Hatch as well as trucks parked along the road edge.



This is just a different view of his shop.



New Mexico is a lot of wide open spaces... and some mountains.  After our tour of Hatch we went out into the middle of nowhere to see the City of Rocks State Park.  This is an exotic collection of volcanic "art", set in the middle of a grama grass plain.  No, I don't know what grama grass is.  It was formed by a huge explosion called the Kneeling Nun eruption about thirty four million nine hundred thousand years ago.  Only six other places in the world have similar formations.