I scoured Mountain Project (an online crowd-sourced rock-climbing guide) before moving to Southern New Mexico in 2023, hoping to find climbing areas near Silver City. There are a few, but Granite Gap near the “Bootheel,” the southward protrusion of New Mexico that borders Arizona and Chihuahua, Mexico, sounded especially intriguing because of its obscurity, even though the climbing wasn’t very tempting. The Mountain Project reporter noted that:
“Much of the rock is dubious…This is a primitive desert environment where it seems every plant and animal is hostile. Cactus everywhere and huge rattlesnakes. Sounds great heh?”
Though bouldering with fat rattlesnakes and cactus spine landings didn’t appeal, empty desert along the Mexican border did, and I looked forward to exploring and photographing this unknown (to me) piece of New Mexico. Web searches revealed few images except for those by Continental Divide Trail hikers on the first few days of their northbound treks, taken as they slogged across shadeless desert, drinking from cattle troughs to get to Lordsburg and then the Gila National Forest, where the trail becomes less stark. A few people have documented tiny towns and mining ruins, but images are scarce, prompting dreams of unique photo opportunities, rare in a world so awash in imagery.
Technically, Granite Gap is a little north of the Bootheel, though everything south of Lordsburg is usually lumped in. The Bootheel itself isn’t small, covering about 1,500 square miles, but that’s a tiny fraction of the area of New Mexico, and with a population density of about one person per square mile, most living around a few tiny towns (Animas, Cotton City, Hatchita, Rodeo) between mountain ranges, there’s a lot of empty country. But much of the land is private or inaccessible.
The Diamond A Ranch, one of largest ranches in the Bootheel, is committed to conservation and cooperates with the Nature Conservancy but doesn’t allow public access, even forcing the CDT to be rerouted around their holdings and causing controversy due to locked gates on county roads which are supposed to be open to all. Some of the prominent mountain ranges (Big Hatchets, Alamo Huecos, Peloncillos) in the Bootheel include large Wilderness Study Areas but are difficult or impossible to access, while others (Animas, San Luis) are mostly private and off-limits. That’s a lot of intriguing country that is out-of-bounds for most of us.
Despite the harsh arid environment, the Bootheel was home to indigenous people for thousands of years. I’ve read journal articles describing archaeological sites all over the area, many along the margins of playas that were presumably a source of water or in the foothills where water was also more abundant. On one trip, armed with waypoints gleaned from archaeological site descriptions, I tried to visit some of these pre-contact sites but was stopped every time by locked gates or No Trespassing signs.
More recently, Geronimo, the Apache military leader, surrendered in 1886 to Lt. Charles Gatewood near Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains before being shipped to Florida to join other Apache prisoners. He died a prisoner of war in Ft. Sill, Kansas in 1909. A stone monument to his surrender west of the entrance to Skeleton Canyon incorporates matates once used to grind corn or mesquite pods, but that end of the canyon is blocked by private land, requiring long hot hikes to access it from the east or south. The title of David Roberts' book, Once They Moved Like the Wind, about Geronimo and the Apache wars, evokes the freedom Apache and other indigenous people enjoyed before ranchers and miners claimed the land for themselves.
Part of Mexico until the Gadsen Purchase in late-1853, the Bootheel and southern Arizona were the last significant addition of land to the contiguous United States. The $10 million purchase facilitated a southern transcontinental railroad between the South and the West Coast. This was before the Civil War, but southerners, including Gadsen, feared that without a southern railroad line, the North would benefit disproportionately from trade. Events leading to the purchase were complicated, but the result was the addition of close to 30,000 square miles of territory to the U.S. extending from near Las Cruces to the California border and incorporation Tucson, Yuma, and other important southwestern cities.
Today, the Bootheel is a hotspot for illegal immigration despite Trump’s wall and the heavy presence of the Border Patrol. In the Southern Peloncillos, I’ve seen border agents on horseback, rifles in scabbards, riding into the hills like a posse from the Old West to track immigrants. Border Patrol pickup trucks drag tires along road margins and fencelines, smoothing the dirt so that fresh footprints can be detected and followed. Camping near the border is said to be dangerous, and there are occasional incidents with smugglers moving people or drugs.
So, the Bootheel is an interesting and complicated place, but despite a half-dozen driving trips and a few exploratory hikes, I’ve seen little of it and photographed even less, mostly without much success. In the wide-open desert, it’s hard to find ways to anchor a 35 mm frame. The morning sun bursts over the horizon, transforming the Borderlands in minutes from soft to glaring light. Sunsets linger a little longer but are also fleeting, and the sky is often cloudless, less visually interesting than when storms sweep through, rarer during weak monsoons like I’ve experienced since moving to New Mexico. In summer, the Bootheel bakes in the sun and temperatures are often over 100 degrees, discouraging outdoor adventure. Still, the lure of obscurity is strong, and there is a lot of exploring to be done, particularly in the mountains. With work, these ranges can surely be accessed, even while we can no longer move through them like the wind.
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