The Road to Heron

Dale and I packed up, hit the dump on the way out, and headed across Navajo Dam toward Chama and Heron Lake State Park. Now the road across the dam is a scary experience, even without a construction crew working on it. It’s a narrow two lane, with no guard rails and steep drop offs on both sides. Luckily, there is not much traffic on it. Usually. We started across, both of us straddling the center line until we came upon a pickup truck parked in the oncoming lane, sitting over the center line. There was just barely enough room to slowly squeeze past without falling off the cliff, but we both made it with at least a quarter of an inch to spare.

Google photo

It was pretty smooth sailing from there to Dulce, where we pulled into a small church parking lot for a quick potty break. The pastor saw us and immediately came out to welcome us and invite us to unhitch, set up camp and stay awhile. We tried to be as courteous as we could, while extricating ourselves from the “new best friends trap” he was attempting to create.

We filled with gas and groceries in Chama, before driving on to Heron Lake State Park. We pulled into the Visitor’s Center parking lot where I unhitched my car, and we drove through all the campgrounds to find the best sites and the best cell signal. We found two nice sites in Brushy Point where we both received 3 bars of LTE, dropped a lawn chair in each one, and went back to get our Minnies.

Heron Lake

Beautiful walking trails around the campgrounds. 

The lake is extremely low - unpleasantly so - but the campground is beautiful, with large, well spaced, level sites. There were only three other campers when we arrived and few campers came and left throughout the week. At one point we were the only two in the whole campground, and when we left, there was just a lone class B still there.

The weather was nice, but cool, the first several days, but turned more chilly as the week wore on. When the forecast called for snow the following week, we decided to load up on Sunday and head back down to Navajo, 1000 feet lower elevation, in search of warmer spring.

I’ll recap our sightseeing around Heron in the next post.