Finding Water

Apparently there's a lot of finding to be done in Silver City. The town is a bit behind the 21st century. You can do a lot of searching to find information, like when the play Grease is showing at the historic Opera House or when and where you can take yoga classes. Good luck! What I've found is you need to operate like Missoula in the early 2000's. You know, head down to the coffee shop and look at all the fliers, collect phone numbers and call. However, if you call after hours, if there are real hours, there's no answering machine. Not even a machine that tells you their hours. Lot's of finding to be done.

I've also tried the referral system to find information. You know, ask someone that lives here. Again good luck, no one has a clue what's going on and they can't direct you anywhere by street name. I was trying to find the gym because I finally found out about yoga, but I couldn't find out about the classes, even though I called, I needed to stop in. So I asked a local about the gym, they said across the street from the fast food Chinese place. Great! Like I'll ever go there :) I ended up looking up the address in the good old phone book.

Okay, back to finding water. As you remember early on in this venture I was trying to find humans, found, done, even went on a hike with two locals Friday. Then today a friend of one of the ladies introduced herself to me at the trailhead. It's nice to have people to talk to. Oh yeah, finding water.....

As you may remember we found water, below Lake Roberts. The goal to let the dogs go swimming. Strike 1, Lake Roberts has swimmers itch, bummer, dogs were very sad.

So on Friday the dogs and I went Northwest about 20 miles to Gila, NM. We actually took a left before Gila and found the Gila River that flows into Bill Evans Lake. I didn't even go to the lake probably has swimmers itch. I did however find an access spot to the river. Not as easy as in Montana. Most bridges that cross the river have huge high fences that block any access. Water is a huge commodity here and apparently the locals aren't sharing it!

Below the Gila River, access a success. It was a bit smelly and tracked with cow shit, but the dogs didn't seem to mind. Oh and yes, wolf dogs can swim, he sort of looks like a beaver with pointy ears :) and the twins loved it too!

Not sure if we'll find more water than this without driving 2+ hours and this water wasn't very deep. If it stays hot without rain for a few weeks we probably won't have this water either. However, until then I'll take the dogs swimming at least once a week.