Deming, New Mexico USA

Yesterday I drove up to Deming, New Mexico USA to visit the Deming Luna County Historical Museum. It has been closed for 14 months undergoing renovation, and it recently reopened.

It was really surprisingly good. Many people had told me that it was a good museum, but it is so easy to discount what others say. But honestly this really is right up at the top of the best museums I have ever visited. I say that from the perspective of having visited the British Museum 4 or 5 times, the Louvre in Paris probably 8 or 10 times (I’ve kind of lost track), the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and lots of museums in New York City, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, Florence, Israel, Greece, etc.

I expected there to be some nice Indian pottery and some pretty minerals and rocks. Turns out to be one of the finest historical museums I have ever been in anywhere. Antique glass, oil lamps, carbide lanterns for miners and late 1800s bicycles, china, furniture, fire trucks, old cars and pickups, the military in the old west, WWII military, grandfather clocks, a Gustav Becker German wall clock frmo the 1880s, indian pots, baskets, arrow heads and artificats in prodigious quantities, unreal collections of antique bells, nut crackers, whiskey bottles, old business machines, old medical, old dental, an old funeral home, an old barber shop, old radios, a room full of dolls (not for me, but I'll bet that the chicks love it), an old real jail cell, old real chuck wagon, lots of geology, rocks, geodes, 2,000 year old Roman coins, etc etc etc.

El Paso doesn’t have anything that comes even close, even though it is a much, much larger place than Deming. The people who put this museum together and keep it running deserve a great deal of credit. I was so impressed that I joined the Deming Historical Society.

Afterwards we drove off North of Deming hoping to visit Fluorite Ridge and maybe the Pony Hills petroglyphs. The desert is really such an interesting place. It can be so incredibly dry here. Going without rain for 6 months or more is not at all out of the ordinary.

At 58 years old this was the first time that I have ever seen running water from a flash flood many miles away.

It was sunny and sure didn’t feel like rain in any way. But when we crested a little hill I had to panic stop, skidding on the dirt road and stopping before falling off into a muddy creek right ahead of me where the road used to be. If I had been in the 4 wheel drive car we might have tried to get through, but there is no way that the Toyota Corolla would have made it through this.