Put on your cowboy hat and working pair of boots to celebrate the Old West's restaurant on the range--the chuckwagon. Betcha there will be no microwave ovens in the infield of the Ruidoso Downs Race Track on New Mexico Highway 70 where 40 cowboy cookin' teams will compete over open fires for a large purse for their beef, beans, potatoes, biscuit and dessert creations. Judges points are swayed by authenticity. This competition is the hottest in the West.

Snow Country magazine called Ruidoso, New Mexico’s Ski Run Road “a 15-mile corkscrew with precious few guardrails.” Well, it’s actually only a little more than 12 miles up to Ski Apache (sometimes it just feels like more) and hey - there are more guardrails than there used to be.

The lady at the Forest Service office in Ruidoso said I could take a tree up to ten feet tall, so that's what I was determined to do. Although tempted, I wasn't going to give up on removing this tree and taking it to the land I'd bought a couple of years ago. The land where I'll live someday.

Ruidoso is a place without pretentions and a unique village. A mountain town at 7,000 feet, it is located on U.S. Highway 70. The population numbers about 8,000, more on weekends in the winter when skiers come to town, and up to twenty-five or thirty thousand on summer weekends during horse racing season.

The sound of water cascading over the immense wooden wheel is sometimes barely audible over the traffic on Ruidoso’s main street. But the wheel turns as steadily as it did more than a century ago. Inside the adobe walls of the old Dowlin Mill , two flint millstones slowly grind a handful of dried yellow corn into fine meal. The mill, Ruidoso’s oldest building, was built by Paul Dowlin, a Civil War veteran and retired Army captain who served at nearby Fort Stanton. It was his second attempt in the mill business. The first mill, built at the junction of Ruidoso River and Carrizo Creek, was swept away by heavy rains just a few weeks after its completion.