Storrie Lake State Park and the Storied Town of Las Vegas, New Mexico
Storrie Lake State Park is conveniently located about five miles outside of Las Vegas – no, not that Las Vegas with all the flashy casinos and abundant entertainment; we’re talking about the original Las Vegas in northeastern New Mexico. While we anticipated spending a week or two at Storrie Lake within easy biking distance of the city, we only used the park as a one or two-night stopover between locations on three separate occasions. The park is heavily used – perhaps overly used considering its size – as is evident in the rundown and hastily maintained facilities. The dump station has been permanently closed because it simply couldn’t accommodate the amount of RV traffic through the park, and the planned upgrade is supposedly far down the state engineer’s list of projects. The camping areas are haphazardly laid out, resembling glorified parking lots complete with heavy vehicular traffic as opposed to more natural, comfortable campsites. The bathrooms and picnic shelters are perpetually dirty, and we’ve rarely spotted park staff or camp hosts on premises on our admittedly few days in the park. This is in stark contrast to other New Mexico parks, such as Coyote Creek (coming up in the next post), where the staff and camp hosts are always visibly present and the facilities are extremely well-kept and maintained on a daily basis.
Storrie Lake draws visitors because it’s one of the only lakes in the area that allows the use of motorized vessels on the water. The lake attracts a large weekend crowd and the locals appear to use the campsites as RV storage during the week, only appearing on the weekends to unlock their rigs and maybe shuffle them between sites or to vacate a space at the end of the 14-day parking limit to allow a friend to immediately pull into the site. We’ve not only witnessed this to a limited extent, but we’ve also heard similar experiences from other RVers we’ve met during our travels around New Mexico. The park offers primitive camping along the shoreline of the lake, where it’s a free-for-all of RVs, tents, and cars. The primitive camping area is pretty pleasant during the week, but quickly swarmed on the weekend with occasionally rowdy revelers and late-night parties.
On our first visit to Storrie Lake, we arrived just before noon on a Tuesday the week before the Fourth of July. We intended to find an available space and stay parked through the upcoming holiday. Our plans quickly changed when we discovered every single campsite was already occupied with RVs, yet few people were actually in the park. We thought they were just out boating or maybe in town for the afternoon and didn’t think much of the eerie lack of human presence. Quickly rethinking our plans, we drove into the primitive beach camping area and easily found parking that suited us for at least one night while we considered our options.
We definitely didn’t want to stay parked on the beach through the weekend, and we didn’t expect to find a site magically vacant by the next morning. After consulting our handy New Mexico State Park paper map and doing a little internet research thanks to the strong Verizon signal, we decided to leave the next morning and try our luck at Coyote Creek State Park. Not to give away too much of the next post, but we found a site there and happily enjoyed a two-week stay through the Fourth of July. We can only assume the vacant RVs at Storrie Lake were simply saving spaces in preparation for the upcoming holiday weekend, but we didn’t hang around long enough to confirm our suspicions. We chose to make the most of our single day at Storrie Lake and broke out our bikes for an exploration of Las Vegas. Our overnight spot on the beach was pleasant, with a nice view overlooking the water complimented by a quiet evening. The shoreline gets a little buggy at dusk, but you’re camping close to water so that’s not really unexpected.
The town of Las Vegas is host to a variety of fiestas, motorcycle rallies, musical events, and art shows with the park serving as readily available lodging for out of town visitors. Storrie Lake was likely filled to capacity (excluding the primitive beach camping area) on our first visit because Las Vegas holds a week-long fiesta leading up to and through Independence Day – something us naive out-of-towners didn’t know while deciding how to spend the holiday. On our second visit, we found quite a few available developed sites and decided to pull into one that was grouped along with three others in what we assumed was an out-of-the way area. Turns out people will drive through campsites and avoid the main roads to save a few seconds on their beeline trip to the lake. With narrow access roads on both sides of that campsite along with the accompanying traffic, we quickly decided we only wanted to stay one night, much like our previous visit. We likely could have found a more pleasant site the next morning, but I didn’t want to spend more time in an uncomfortable location knowing that the much preferred Villanueva State Park was only a short drive away. Thus ended our second experience at Storrie Lake.
On our third pass through Las Vegas, we decided we’d give Storrie Lake one more shot – this time planning to find beach parking and ignoring the developed sites completely. We chose an area away from the water and close to the treeline to get a bit of shade, not to mention to avoid the softer shoreline soil since the rainy season was well underway. We actually stayed two nights this time, taking advantage of the Verizon signal to catch up on some online chores and start planning our route back east for the fall. On our second night, we were decidedly fortunate to choose parking further away from shore as we witnessed a car get stuck in the mud, as well as the two police cars and truck that originally arrived to rescue it during a heavy rainstorm. Two more winch-equipped pick-ups, a backhoe(!), and a heavy-duty tow truck later, all mud-bound vehicles were rescued while the related beach traffic during the storm left deep ruts along the dirt (well, mud) access road. With the area we were in growing too muddy for our peace of mind, we packed up the next morning while the sun was shining and the ground was firm(ish), leaving our own shallow tire tracks behind without incident.
While our brief experiences at Storrie Lake may have been less than ideal, the park might be exactly what you have in mind for your next RV excursion. The campground has both electric and non-electric sites, with the electric sites being mostly obtained only through reservations. Four non-reservation electric sites are available, but one is dedicated as a camp host site and the other three seem to be always filled. The primitive beach camping area is very large, and visitors without reservations should have no problem finding parking there – just be mindful of the weather and mud. The lake is open to fishing, swimming, motorboats, jet skis, and other forms of recreation, so it might be perfect if you travel with a boat. If you’d like to see the historic town of Las Vegas, the park is a short drive or bike ride away. The highway connecting the park to town is actually a designated bicycle route, with wide shoulders and gentle grades. Cyclists and pedestrians can also enjoy a trail leading through town along the Gallinas River, and although not incredibly scenic, does provide an alternate route to traverse the city.
THE TUMULTUOUS TALE OF THE TOWN OF LAS VEGAS
The story of nearby Las Vegas is a tale fraught with conflict, turmoil, and strife, the remnants of this tumultuous history still lingering to the present day. Not long after Mexico fought for independence from Spain, Mexican pioneers received the first official land grant in 1825 claiming the area around Las Vegas which had been considered a no man’s land for the previous 200 years. The Mexican government was growing nervous that the land would soon be claimed by the United States and took action to secure the area. Three years later, Capitan Juan José Arocha met with a band of 600 Comanche warriors at the Gallinas River to negotiate a formal treaty uniting the settlers and the Comanche, long-time allies in the fight against the Mescalero and Lipan Apaches. By 1833, Miguel Romero y Baca and his three brothers settled the land referred to as the meadows in Las Vegas to raise beans and corn, a move associated with an expanded effort to fortify the eastern border from raids from the Plains Indians. He and his brothers pledged to “succeed this time in keeping the Indians from crossing the meadows” but their farm also just happened to be conveniently located along the main route to Missouri, and the brothers had plans to establish trade with Kansas City.
The newly formed Mexican government never established a functional bureaucracy and quickly began to fall into despotism. The Republic of Texas was the first to secede from Mexico in 1836, claiming autonomy and forming essentially a country unto itself. During the Mexican-American war in 1846, the United States government decided it was time to claim what is now New Mexico as part of the expanding nation and Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny arrived in Las Vegas to announce that very thing. With no resistance from Mexico, Kearny and his 1,500-strong Army of the West quickly transformed the market area of the Plaza in the center of town into the Las Vegas Post, a temporary Army fort that would serve to protect the wagon routes east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains until Fort Union could be constructed. Thus the seeds of discontent were planted as the residents of Las Vegas were not only enraged at the unexpected and obviously unwanted forceful takeover, but also baffled with the apparent inaction of their own poorly organized and disintegrating national government to resist this foreign incursion.
While Kearny’s arrival in New Mexico was essentially without conflict, the newly appointed provisional governor and longtime resident of New Mexico, Charles Bent strenuously cautioned the army officers to respect the rights of the inhabitants and take measures to prevent abuses to avoid serious consequences. Bent’s warning apparently went unheeded, when less than one year later New Mexican and Pueblo Indian rebels attacked and killed about ten American officials, including Bent himself, in the Taos Revolt. A detachment of US soldiers quickly marched on Taos, killing 150 rebels and capturing 400 others.
In the trials that followed, 28 more rebels were convicted of murder and treason and executed. The only eye witness account of these trials was recorded by a young traveler and later author Lewis Hector Garrard, who criticized the American government for conquering a country and arraigning the revolting inhabitants for treason. In Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail, he writes “Treason, indeed! What did the poor devil know about his new allegiance? But so it was; and, as the jail was overstocked with others awaiting trial, it was deemed expedient to hasten the execution…Justice! out upon the word, when its distorted meaning is the warrant for murdering those who defend to the last their country and their homes.”
The New Mexico Territory was officially established under the American government in 1850. Governor Henry Connelly declared Las Vegas the official capital of the Territory of New Mexico in 1862. By this point, the Plaza had returned to a trade center with pioneer merchants owning and improving most of the buildings in the square while launching annual caravans loaded with wool and hides to Missouri. Connelly decided to move the Territory’s capital offices to Las Vegas in retreat from the encroaching Confederate Texans who would soon “face the combined strength of the Coloradan and New Mexican volunteers” during the Civil War. During the short 37 year span from 1825 to 1862, the pioneers of Las Vegas endured raids from hostile Native Americans, were forcefully subjected to unwanted rule under a foreign government, and then faced potential violence on their doorstep in the new nation’s civil war.
The tide of fortune seemed to turn for Las Vegas in 1879, as the first locomotive from the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroads arrived at a station about a mile from the Plaza. The town was to become the primary railhead for all of eastern New Mexico, with popular sentiment anticipating Las Vegas to transform into “the Denver of the Southwest”. The trains carried more than economic fortune, however, as Las Vegas was quickly overrun with unsavory characters riding the rails. The infamous Dodge City gang terrorized the area while the likes of Billy the Kid, Sawdust Charlie, and Little Jack prowled the streets. A vigilante group of merchants, commissioners, and other “substantial” citizens banded together in 1880 to combat the rampant crime wave crushing the now lawless city.
By 1882, the Las Vegas Vigilance Committee appeared to have returned law and order to the town, and once again Las Vegas was back on track to “fulfill its big city destiny”. New hotels and resorts were being built to attract tourism to the city, including the Montezuma Hotel – one of 16 famed “Harvey Houses” in New Mexico. Without going into too much detail here, Fred Harvey essentially established the chain restaurant concept in the United States, with first-class eateries stretching from Chicago to California featuring a waitstaff comprised of modest, honorable, highly-trained Harvey Girls. Apparently there’s a movie from 1946 (titled The Harvey Girls) in which Judy Garland portrays one of these Harvey Girls, but I haven’t seen it – maybe it’s familiar to you. In addition to high-end dining, the Harvey Houses in New Mexico featured luxury overnight accommodations complete with bath houses and lush courtyards. The Harvey House story is too much for this already lengthy post, but if this sparked your interest, you can find a few books on the topic, not to mention plenty of articles scattered across the web for more information.
A short three years later, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad connecting Albuquerque to San Diego was completed signalling a premature end to Las Vegas’ dominance in the rail travel arena. As tourists flocked to the new rail line, Albuquerque quickly surpassed Las Vegas and the town once again began to fall into economic decline. In addition to this crushing blow, Las Vegas continued to struggle with internal conflict as two factions battled within city limits. Politics essentially tore the town in half, with the new railtown (creatively dubbed “New Town”) progressively at odds with the more traditional older side of town (you’d never guess this is called “Old Town”) across the Gallinas River (which actually forms a physical boundary between the two halves). The next ten years were filled with continued turmoil. Cattle ranchers and shepherds butted heads outside of town, political parties tore at each others’ throats, and a group of horse thieves and murderers enacted a two-year reign of terror in Old Town. Hopes were dashed as the bright future in store for Las Vegas once again quickly dimmed under a curtain of blood and violence.
The freight train lines eventually shared the same fate as the passenger lines, when in 1912 the flat route across the Texas panhandle to Albuquerque was completed making the Raton Pass line obsolete. Las Vegas once again lost rail traffic to Albuquerque with little hope remaining for it to ever return to a substantial degree. This also happened to be same year New Mexico officially gained statehood, becoming the 47th state of the Union. The town limped along for the next 30 years until the US Army opened Camp Luna in Las Vegas, a mobilization training camp handling thousands of soldiers moving through town before shipping off to war. This infusion was short-lived, with no real lasting economic impact on the area.
Remember the strife between Old and New Town way back in the late 1800s? Well, in 1968 the two halves symbolically joined together as the mayor of the Town of Las Vegas met with the mayor of the City of Las Vegas on the bridge crossing the Gallinas River. This official meeting signified the public end of a nearly century-long rivalry. While the symbolic mayoral handshake didn’t magically solve all the problems between the two parties, it was the first step in what would be a long, grueling process to right whatever perceived historical wrongs existed within the city. In speaking with various residents of northeastern New Mexico over the past month or so, I’ve learned that this shadowy, nebulous rivalry still exists to some degree. No one was able to specifically give a concrete example, so maybe it’s more of an oddly romantic notion at this point. Or maybe you really only understand if you’ve lived in Las Vegas for any significant amount of time. We didn’t experience anything firsthand that would perpetuate the conflict, but we’re simply travelers passing through and likely missed any subtle nuances between various groups within the city.
As the end of the 20th century approached, the film and television industry became an increasing presence in Las Vegas. Silent films were shot in Las Vegas as early as 1915, but film crews visited and worked in the city with increasing regularity by the 1970s and continuing into the present day. Part of the 1969 classic Easy Rider was filmed in the Plaza, as Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson weave their motorcycles through a marching band. And who can forget the 1984 epic Red Dawn, featuring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as teenage guerrilla fighters valiantly resisting a Soviet invasion on American soil (please don’t mention the crappy 2012 remake starring Chris Hemsworth). Tanks rolled through New Town “blowing up” various buildings, while Memorial Middle School, the Fort Union Drive-In, and Douglas Avenue were all featured in the film. Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel, the gritty No Country for Old Men filmed in 2007 featured a scene in which the assassin Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) prowled the streets of Las Vegas. Portions of all six seasons of the popular television show Longmire were filmed in Las Vegas, with many of the actors in the show proclaiming their real-life love for the town as a result. This is in no way an exhaustive list of all the movies and television shows set in Las Vegas, as the list formed over the last four decades continues to rapidly expand.
OUR LAS VEGAS EXPLORATION
We didn’t see any movie stars or film crews during our brief passes through Las Vegas, but we did sample a bit of the town on three separate occasions. In between stops at the various antique stores, bookshops, historic drugstore, and even a fabric and yarn store, we popped into just a few of the bars and restaurants scattered around town. Charlie’s Bakery and Cafe is arguably the most well-known restaurant in town, so we made time to stop for breakfast one morning. Featuring typical diner fare with a New Mexican flair, Charlie’s offers large portions in a classic diner atmosphere. The bakery display features enormous cream puffs, iced and sprinkled donuts, and cookies of various shapes and sizes. Fresh tortillas are made daily on premises with the production area sitting on display at the front of the restaurant. Expect a long wait during the festival season or New Mexico Highlands University graduation weekend, or maybe just visit on a weekday and avoid the crowds. The Skillet is a younger, hipper restaurant owned and operated by a newer generation of the family that runs Charlie’s. We enjoyed an afternoon snack of chile rellenos and a sampling of tacos (OK, it was more than a snack) along with a couple of beverage selections from the bar. The location boasts artwork created by the owners and features live music in the evenings. The appropriately named Traveler’s Cafe located on the Plaza is a good stop for a morning cup of coffee and a convenient meeting place for friends and neighbors. Also worth a mention is Borracho’s, a craft beer and cocktail bar with regularly scheduled live music and special events. We happened to stop in during our first visit to Las Vegas the week before the Fourth of July, and caught a Texas swing band from Austin while sipping New Mexican craft brews.
Las Vegas may no longer be the railroad heavy hitter from the Wild West days of yore, but rail travelers can still reach the city on the Southwest Chief Amtrak line. With over 900 buildings on the historic register, Las Vegas is a town actively preserving its past while struggling to thrive in the future. The town truly has something for everyone, with antique stores littering the downtown area, a wide variety of restaurants (including a pizza place with a three lane bowling alley inside), a 50-seat boutique movie theater, beautifully preserved historic buildings, and spectacular outdoor recreation available not far from the city limits. Outdoor enthusiasts can find top-notch fishing, biking, hiking, skiing, rafting, and birdwatching – you name it, you can likely find it within an hour of Las Vegas. The Sabinoso Wilderness is a high-desert natural area that received the official wilderness designation from Congress in 2009, but only recently became accessible to the public. Las Vegas is the closest city to the Sabinoso, serving as a gateway to this pristine wild area. Officials hope the recent access to the Sabinoso will cause an upswing in ecotourism (recognized as a growth industry in Las Vegas), as has been evidenced in other areas of New Mexico.
After 200 years of conflict and disappointment, maybe Las Vegas is finally hitting its stride and becoming the town it was meant to be. While it certainly is nowhere near the “Denver of the Southwest”, Las Vegas possesses an unmistakable charm – even if that sparkle might be hidden under layers of centuries-old dust and dimmed by longstanding feuds. The town clearly struggles economically, with homes and businesses in visible disrepair or abandoned altogether. Job prospects are meager at best, and that’s before considering the rumor that the local Walmart plans to move completely to self-checkout lines and eliminate positions as a result. But historical preservation efforts continue, as the city methodically follows the in-fill philosophy of repairing and restoring existing structures rather than building new. The Castañeda Hotel, the second Harvey House in Las Vegas, is currently undergoing renovation with plans to open portions to the public by 2019. Ecotourism could provide the economic stimulus needed for Las Vegas to thrive, as people begin to discover the Sabinoso Wilderness. With festivals abounding throughout the year, Las Vegas already has the groundwork set to promote tourism and attract much-needed income. If you’re seeking an authentic glimpse into history, a rich cultural experience, and an exploration of untamed wilderness, hop on a train to Las Vegas and create your own wild west adventure. And if you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of your favorite actor while you’re in town.
SOURCES
1. I used the Las Vegas NM – San Miguel County Visitors Guide 2018-2019 for the historical details on the city of Las Vegas. While most visitors guides we’ve seen are filled with advertisements for local business and not much else, this particular guide is a veritable treasure trove of information. Historical details, in-depth articles (the Harvey Houses, the Sabinoso, the movies and television industry), unique local stories – it really is a surprisingly useful and informative publication. I’ve never considered hanging onto a visitors guide, but this one’s going in our small stash of paper maps.
2. Wikipedia is, as always, an excellent source of information when sources are accurately and properly cited. I used the History of New Mexico article for additional details specifically in reference to the time period of the Mexican-American War and initial occupation of New Mexico.