Rock Hound State Park - Deming New Mexico

We've spent a great couple of days here at Rock Hound State Park.  We are staying in a small  - but nice campground.  One of it's best qualities is the quiet...the sites are far apart and level.  It's also cheap $14 a night - for electricity and water.  The views are spectacular.  At night you can see all of the twinkling lights of Deming.  

As you can tell from the name, rocks are an important part of this state park.  The park rangers are all knowledgeable about the geology and rocks of the area.  It's pretty cool to be able take rock from the park. 

We met a very talkative guy (Randy called him an "old guy" - but I think he was only a couple of years older than me.) who wanted to tell us all about the rocks and show us where to find interesting specimens. He camps in a tent in the park for long periods of time and just wanders around looking for "treasures" as he calls them.  The day we talked to him he had found a lot of pieces of Jasper.  One in particular he decided had been a tool of some kind for the Native Americans.  He had a magnifier out to show how it had been chipped and shaped. After we some similar things in a museum the other day ....I think he was right. 

I picked up several specimens...mainly Jasper, but I did find one that has some opal and a couple of other types of minerals. 

 

Rock Hound State Park has a day use area called Spring Canyon.  We took a drive up there to to geocache and to check it out.  We didn't get to the geocaches there ...too many muggles and then we were kicked out because they were closing the gate.  But we did see the steepest grade road we had ever come across...17% grade. 

 

We did geocache near the campgrounds and found our first "floater" cache where you have to pour water in to get the actual cache container to float to the top.