Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Wet and Wonderful Camping at Our Aqua Oasis

By Carol Mell, 9-21-07

	Camping at the "no wake" Heron Lake is my idea of a vacation. Often Wayne and I have the lake all to ourselves.

When I go camping, I go looking for water. This goes back to my days growing up next to the Columbia River. Summer heat gave us two choices, picnic with the rattlesnakes or head for the cove and dive into delicious, cool refreshment. OK, so we were just downriver from the Hanford Nuclear Site where people worked in yellow suits and where my Grandpa’s cousin Neil did something top secret but what did we know? Back then we thought the government was looking out for us.

Looking around from Taos, the best place to swim is Heron Lake State Park near the tiny village of Tierra Amarilla. As Wayne and I floated our bodies in the cool reservoir of San Juan River water destined for the Rio Chama and the cities and crops to the south, we rarely saw humans though diving Western Grebes came everyday for company.

A few people came to sail and fish in this “No-Wake” lake at 7200 feet. Several campgrounds offer electricity, showers and such but we prefer the far end of the “primitive,” (translate that “poor man’s”) campground where we have more osprey neighbors than human. I even feel guilty for camping in the fish hawks’ front yard.

If our plan was to seek the healing properties of water, this year the water seemed to come looking for us. I can report that for the first time in my life I had to bail out the old tent, not once but twice.

Ours is a low-tech tent, heavy as heck, which we got to house dogs, children and card games in the rain. It didn’t come with a fancy fly, as necessary to tents as men’s pants, but I figured it must be waterproof.

Over ten years ago, on our first night in the Gila River Wilderness, the storms were ferocious. The tent leaked bad, starting at the corners, so that the three girls, one damp dog and two adults tried to shrink ourselves into a smaller and smaller heap in the middle of the tent.

That was the only camping trip we abandoned, fleeing to the nearest motel. As we drove the winding road out, our camping trip ruined, the lightning whipped around us as if to celebrate our departure.

Back home, I bought tubes and tubes of seam sealer and went to work. We’ve had some seepage since but I wasn’t worried because we have one of those fat air mattresses. We might find ourselves floating like Noah’s Ark when the Canada Geese woke us up each morning but we’d still be dry as long as the water seeped in around the edges.

This year, the seam sealer had worn off and we woke up wet and miserable. So, off we went to Tierra Amarilla and bought a spray sealant. That night it rained lions and circus poodles, great wet roaring sheets of anger buffeted our old tent. I slept secure in the knowledge of spray-on sealant. Trouble was we battened down all the windows so that in the morning, though the rain was gone, we heard drip, drip on our pillows and clothes. We’d sealed the tent so well it was raining condensation on the inside.

We crawled out of our cramped dampness into a magical morning of fog, a sight so rare in the Southwest that we had to wander around in it saying, “ooh” and “ahh” as if we were admiring a Rembrandt.

Water makes a world apart, takes us to bigger visions of time and place. So what if we got a little wet? When the sun burned off the fog, we swam in the blue-green water with the sun making golden halos around our heads and streaks of light shooting from our fingertips. Little fingerlings nibbled our toes. In the evenings, golden sunset colors framed fish jumping out of the water as if straining for a new life. One late afternoon after a storm, a complete double rainbow arced over our little camp like a blessing.

The only damage was a bag of books I’d kept in the car for safety. When we hauled water to the camp I’d not closed the tap on our container and it flooded the car. 

I know the State of New Mexico did not create this lake for beauty. The intent was plain and simply water storage, but in good rain years like this one that wonderful creation draws osprey, grebes, deer, elk, mountain bluebirds and me into its orb.

For once maybe the government was on my side when it built Heron Lake and for that aqua oasis I am grateful and so, by the way, are the bald eagles that occupy the pines there in winter, the same pines the osprey leave behind. I’ll try to go see them in February even if it is too cold for swimming.

You are danged if you do and danged if you don’t but you can check out my lake at www.emnrd.state.nm.us/PRD/heron.htm. Just don’t take my spot.

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