About an hour after we left Taos, we found ourselves driving through the scenic Cimarron Canyon, near Eagle Nest, NM (feature photo). There’s a state park located there, and the clear waters of the Cimarron River combined with the cliffs of Palisade Mountain make for a jaw-dropping landscape.

Just 20 minutes beyond the park on US highway 64 is the town of Cimarron. We had learned back in Fort Sumner about the wealthy Maxwell family and about Cimarron being home base for the operations of the massive Maxwell Land Grant. Always eager to learn more history, of course we had to make the stop.

Small town with a big history
There are many big land owners today,
but two million acres is huge, regardless of what era you’re in!
We felt as though we had traveled a great portion of the old Santa Fe trail until we saw this map in the town square park
There were a few beautiful old buildings still in use

On our road trip home from Texas, Cimarron was another unplanned stop that we sure didn’t regret.

Original of feature photo. Edits noted below

Photo Note: For my feature photo, I had thought about editing out the oncoming truck, but then thought better of it, because it shows relative size of the rock wall. The original photo was very dark at the bottom half of the photo, so the rock face didn’t show up well. In Snapseed, I first corrected the white balance and then chose the selective tool to address the darkness over the bottom half. With this tool, you can choose whatever area of a photo that you wish to edit for brightness and work on that area alone. This helps to preserve the other areas of the photo (the sky for example) that may otherwise be blown out if the entire photo was brightened.

“If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday.”

Pearl S Buck