Billy the Kid Scenic Byway

Leaving Albuquerque, we journeyed south to search for an outlaw on the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway. The small town of Lincoln is a open-air museum of the battles that occurred in the early west. Billy the Kid was involved in a war among those who were attempting to gain control of contracts to sell beef to the Army and the reservations. The street of town held the blood of his victims. The courtroom of his trial and the jail room of his escape still stand. These buildings and others remain as symbols to tales of villainy vs heroism.
























East Coast money was well spent in towns along the trail. In Ruidoso, the Hubbard Museum of the American West was started by heiress, Anne C. Stradling, who moved to the southwest where she enjoyed horses and life on the range. She donated her private collection which included personal antiques as well as turn of the century carriages to the museum. The museum had another photo exhibit that grabbed Jerry’s attention. The temporary exhibit on mining presented well researched documents that taught us about New Mexico mining and added to our knowledge of California’s gold rush.












Another heiress, this one from Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, and married to a Bancroft, also moved to southern New Mexico, to the town of Alto. There she spent over $20 million building a magnificent theater adorned with glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly. We enjoyed a tour of the building and wished there were a performance during our time in the area.
















With an improvement in the weather, we visited a lava flow. The Valley of Fire in southern New Mexico is the result of lava oozing up rather than an eruption. While not as dramatic as sites on the West Coast, it did allow us direct contact with the lava.



From looking at the earth, we decided to look up, very far up. We visited the Very Large Array, the radio telescope system that was in the movie Contact . There was no one at the visitor’s center to answer my naive questions, so we relied on the label copy along the trail. I learned a lot, but have even more questions. What I found most fascinating were the huge machines used to move these 270-ton telescopes along railroad lines. We want to come back and see it in operation and find someone to answer those simple questions.