| Our first night was spent in Demming New Mexico at an RV park. The following day we checked out two gem hunting places in the book. One had the roads washed out during the recent monsoon rains and the other was pretty void of materials that would cut into jewelry. Since it was early we decided to head up to Los Lunas to the place that we discovered last year to look for agate and camp out in the wilderness. It took us over 1 hour after we got to the area to find the right dirt path to the gems, and we set up and had dinner and watched the sunset over the arroyo and the El Puerco (The Pig) River
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| This is an example of how much stuff there is in this place! I picked this up in about five minutes on the dirt road we were parked next to. The Gem Trails book sends you out in the flats looking for "float", but last year we stumbled upon some gullies going down into the arroyo and the sides were loaded with agate, jasper and petrified wood, some with bright red flashes inside. This trip we wanted to concentrate on finding "Flame Agate"
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| Here is a view of Los Lunas area to show how remote we are.
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| Here is a picture of Katie at Los Lunas.
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| Here is a picture of some of the nice flame agate that we found.
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| The next day we went to the Abiqui reservoir in northern NM. It is an Army Corps of Engineers Recreation area and our Golden Age Passport got us a nice site with water and elec for $7.00.
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From Abiqui (where we found a lot of agate) we drove west to the chaco culture site in western NM. We got to camp right under a small cliff dwelling. The last picture shows the ruins of a central building that was 3 stories tall.
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On the way home we went through Lava Lands National Park and stopped at the La Ventana arch, the largest one in New Mexico.
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