Monument surrounding the city of Las Cruces, and includes several mountain ranges of the Chihuahuan Desert

How to Get There

Overview

The Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument is a national monument in New Mexico, managed by the Bureau of Land Management as part of the National Landscape Conservation System.

Bureau of Land Management, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Image Size Adjusted

Description

The 496,330-acre (200,860 ha) monument is located in the Mesilla Valley in southern New Mexico, surrounding the city of Las Cruces in Doña Ana County. The protected area includes several mountain ranges of the Chihuahuan Desert. The five identified as being within the national monument are the Robledo Mountains, Sierra de las Uvas, Doña Ana Mountains, Organ Mountains and Potrillo Mountains. The Prehistoric Trackways National Monument is nearby. The monument protects a large variety of geological, paleontological and archaeological resources.

Protected areas

Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks protects many archaeological and cultural sites of interest. The Aden Lava Flow Wilderness Study Area is here and there are 243 known archaeological sites within the monument, including some of the earliest Native American settlements and petroglyphs known from three different tribes. The land also includes Shelter Cave and Conkling Cavern. Fossils of ground sloths have been found in the area.

More recently the land was used by William H. Bonney, better known as the outlaw Billy the Kid, and Geronimo, a leader during the Apache Wars, both of whom lived in various parts of New Mexico in the 19th century. It is said that Billy the Kid visited "Outlaw Rock", and there is a cave known as "Geronimo's Rock". The monument also includes 22 miles (35 km) of the historic Butterfield Stagecoach Trail.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0