Las Cruces, New Mexico is the home of New Mexico State University (NMSU), where two of my friends teach: evoutionary biologist Avis James (named by a mother who was an ornithologist), and ecologist Bill Boecklen. I’ve known Avis for a long time, since she was a postdoc at Chicago working on flies, and later became friends with Bill when the two got married. I visited their home in Las Cruces, which they share with a calico cat named Janet, and after two days we repaired to the mountains to visit one of their friends.

First we tended that friend’s garden in his Las Cruces home, picking vegetables to bring up to the mountains. Here are Avis and Bill with some of our haul:

And, of course, no garden in New Mexico would be complete without chiles, the most characteristic ingredient in New Mexican cooking. I favor the green over the red chile.

For breakfast on the day after my arrival, we went to a famous Las Cruces spot, Nellie’s Cafe. It specializes in New Mexican cuisine, and nearly every dish, including breakfast, features the ubiquitous chile.

This is breakfast, which looks like lunch but still satisfied the morning food urge. Along with chips and salsa, I got a mixed plate with a “chile” (pork cubes cooked with scorching green chiles), an enchilada, and a chicken taco, along with rice and delicious refried beans:

Afterwards we repaired to the county government center, which houses the famous Doña Ana County Kitty Condo, which I’ve posted about before.  It’s where all the county’s bureaucracy is housed, but has a distinctly un-bureaucratic feature, a cat adoption center, started by Bill and Avis’s friend Jess Williams.

Enlarge the sign below to read about the Kitty Condos. In short, it’s a large, walk-in cage that houses up to a dozen kittens (they take only young kittens). You can walk into the cage and play with them, or, if you’re working in the building, you can check out a kitten to take to your office for 15 minutes, just as if they were tiny felid library books. That interaction, of course, leads many to fall in love with the kittens—the object of the project.

Here’s the large Kitty Condo cage, which housed only two kittens at the time: a tabby and a tuxedo cat (you can see them both at lower left). The sign about one of them “not feeling well” indicates that one had ringworm, but it had been cured. Note that every kitten put into the Condo (now 101) has been adopted:

I sat in the cage and played with the tiny tabby, who was a real sweetheart. I can see why so many get adopted.

Here’s a video I posted earlier about the Condo project:

Meanwhile, back at the James/Boecklen ranch, they have their own cat, Janet:

Janet isn’t allowed to go out front, and she often stands on two legs peering out the front screened door:

Another meal in Las Cruces, this time at La Neuva Casita Cafe, which TripAdvisor rates as the best restaurant in town. Like Nellie’s, it’s a humble, family-owned place that serves great homemade New Mexican food.

My dinner: a chicken chimichanga covered with guacamole, sour cream, and picante sauce to resemble the Mexican flag. Served with a salad, fideo (Mexican noodles), and rice, it was more than I could eat. Bill and Avis pronounced it good, but not as good as Nellie’s.

We did a several-hour hike in Dripping Springs National Monument in the Organ Mountains. An uphill hike (in brutal heat) took us to a verdant spring where water flows out of the rocks. Although I didn’t bring water, because I was stupid, I couldn’t drink from the spring for fear of giardia. Fortunately, Bill and Avis had extra water for me.

This is a view from up in the mountain toward Las Cruces in the valley below. The plants are ocotillos (Fouquieria splendens), endemic to the southwest US and northern Mexico. The stems are usually gray, leafless, and dry, but they respond to the sporadic rains by putting out leaves.

More ocotillo and the flowering spikes of sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri), whose base in Mexico is fermented, like agave, to make an  alcoholic drink (one plant = one bottle). I’m told it tastes dreadful.

This unusual plant, ephedra (Ephedra fasciculata), also known as “Mormon tea” for its curative properties (I’ve had the tea), is a gymnosperm, like pines, but has flowers like an angiosperm (a flowering plant). The flowers are scaly, as if the plant was a “missing link”. It’s one of the three genera in the Gnetophyta, which is taxonomically grouped with gymnosperms, but I’m not sure if that taxonomic placement is firm, or if the group is more closely related to angiosperms.

I’m certain some botanist will weigh in with the latest assessment, but meanwhile enjoy a flower on a non-angiosperm plant:

The desert was loaded with cacti (many people use them as ornamentals in their yards, as watering is “un-green” in New Mexico). Here are three species, and I’ll leave it to readers to identify them. At least one or two should be easy, at least for Americans:

After the heat of Las Cruces we drove up to to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, which, at 8600 feet, is considerably cooler than the lowlands. There resides geologist Steve Henry, an old friend of Avis and Bill who invited us to stay in his “cabin,” a gorgeous, four-story log and stone construction that he and his wife built around an old railroad workers’ dormitory.

From the porch you get a long view down to the desert, including the famous White Sands National Monument, a gypsum desert where many animals have evolved white coloration to hide from predators or prey. You can see the white flats in the distance:

Nearly everyone I’ve met on my trip has several bird feeders, probably because they like biology and animals. Steve loads some of his up with pecans, which are locally grown. That was a real treat for this lucky woodpecker (identify the species!):

Steve also collects local arrowheads, some of which may be several thousand years old. Here’s his collection (you can often just pick them up off the ground):

Shortly after arriving, we went for a hike in the cool forest with Steve and his d*g. He was searching for mushrooms to eat, and though we found some, they weren’t the edible kind. Instead, we ambled about the trees and meadows and picked wildflowers. Here’s Steve and the canid:

This is in all likelihood a fox den:

Here are some native wildflowers we saw on our hike. Botanists should be able to identify them easily:

One with an orthopteran:

Same plant but with lepidopteran (name the species):

Avis with a bouquet of the flowers she picked. She exclaimed, “Isn’t it beautiful?” and Bill replied, “Yes, and the flowers are nice, too.” What a romantic!

On the way back from the trailhead, Steve stopped at some limestone road cuts so we could look for fossils. He said that this deposit was about 230 million years old. In it we found brachiopods, other shelly stuff, and I came upon part of a largish ammonite:

Avis prepared a great dinner of grilled salmon, tomato-and-cheese tart, and bread, which we ate with some tasty microbrews from Las Cruces, as well as some sauvignon blanc. We dined on the back porch overlooking the valley: life doesn’t get much more pleasant than this (note the wildflowers on the table):