First Trip To Gila National Park

One of the reasons we choose Silver City New Mexico, is its proximity to Gila National Park, a huge expanse of federally managed mountainous land just about 45 winding miles north of the town of Silver City itself. It’s famous for some cave dwellings of the Mogollan people from about 700 years ago, as well as some wonderful hiking trails.

The first thing to note is how unbelievable huge this national park is, as we drove up, we came across constant vistas where you could see for miles, with no sight of any human habitation, in total silence.

Here’s a panorama of our first stop:

And here’s a video, the only sound is when my foot scraped the ground.

The cave dwellings themselves are about a mile hike from the car park, high in a huge volcanic outcrop that dominates the landscape.

The other thing that you may have noticed is that we basically had the park to ourselves. There was about six cars in the parking lot, and it felt we were never closer than 100 feet from another human being, with most of our time having no one around at all.

The other nice thing about Gila is that you can actually enter the cave dwellings, see how people lived and enjoy the stunning views of the valley from their ancient homes, talk about a room with a view!

After visiting the cave dwellings, we then took a 2-3 mile hike around the valley, exploring the river bed and the magnificent views from atop the hills that surround the valley, seeing burnt tree trumps from old forest fires, all the while having the whole place to ourselves, without a sound other than the occasional bird flying by.

All in all pretty amazing and we felt really lucky to be able to spend the day exploring this special place. Apparently there are over a thousand miles of hiking trails in the park, so hopefully we’ll be able to visit again soon!