Authenticity plays a key role in the judging

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.

While others are held in convention centers and parking lots, this Chuckwagon Cookoff is located outdoors in a natural high desert racetrack infield. It’s part of the Lincoln County Cowboy Symposium, held the second weekend in October.

Conditions are rugged — no electricity, no running water, no amenities, period. Overhead there is plenty of clear blue sky, the sun beats down all day, and the stars and moon create another one of New Mexico’s enchanted evening.

Slow food may be a recent trend in cuisine — but it has been around for a long time. Exemplified by turn-of-the century methods, using cast iron implements over wood fires and coals, chuckwagon cuisine is one of today’s most difficult methods. This is more than the thrill of the grill.

This is not an upscale foodie event with exotic, trendy ingredients, long descriptive names, and high points for plate appeal. This is real stuff, where the integrity and honesty of the old west is preserved, revered and celebrated. You get smoke in your eyes, sit under the beating sun, and listen to cowboys reciting poetry and singing with their guitars.

There is no mystery in the food basket supplied to each team. It is good old dried pinto beans, a sack of potatoes, and 20 pounds of beef. The supplies should feed forty.

The judging is based on the authenticity of the wagon and culinary equipment as well as the food quality. Every piece of equipment must have been available before this century began, but reproductions are permitted. The Lodge brand of Dutch ovens and skillets are the Mercedes of this competition. These are the 12", 14" and 16" ovens that guarantee a good upper body workout to lift the lid. Well-seasoned black ones are the best – the ones that are never washed, just wiped out with a paper towel.

You should not care if the beef is tough and the biscuits are burned, but usually it is not. Any smart cook knows how to cut the burn off a biscuit and promote blackened beef. Out on the trail you ate what was served and loved it. Many of these crafty old cooks convinced the hands that if the biscuits had a bit of black on them, that was the way it was supposed to be and that they could eat them or go hungry.

Any questions?

The Hubbard Museum of the American West
P.O. Box 40
Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico 88346
(505) 378-4142
Fax (505) 378-4166
www.hubbardmuseum.org
info@hubbardmuseum.org

The Food Network also has some great coverage of this event.  For more information on viewing times, visit their web site: http://www.foodnetwork.com.

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Ski Run Road. Photo by Frederick Mora

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.

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Land near the author’s Ruidoso property Photo by Greg Holt

The little ponderosa pine was still standing straight even after half an hour of continuous digging around the roots. Sweat ran down my neck and dripped into my eyes. The shovel bounced and skidded on the circular trench I’d excavated around the tree and I noticed that I had begun to grunt comically with each stab of the blade into the compacted brown dirt and rock. I wasn’t used to the altitude and I was breathing hard. Some roots were severed and I scooped dirt from around the trench hoping to maintain a root ball with some of the dry soil in it before digging under the tree’s tap root at the center.

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.

After another fifteen minutes, the tree was laid on its side, and I dug underneath in slightly softer soil until I had about 18 inches of tap root. Finally, the tree was pulled from the hard spare ground. I carefully wrapped and tied the rootball in a cloth, packing clots of the dirt that had fallen away from the springy roots. Shouldering the tree, I carried it to the truck and laid it carefully inside with stiff arms and shaky hands. It was a good tiredness I felt, and I smiled while sipping a cold drink from the cooler and watching deep blue clouds crowd up over the high Sierra Blanca.

The air was cooling as indigo clouds rose in the West, crowding against and pushing over the mountain peaks 12,000 feet high. The massive thunderheads had crossed the burning desert of the Tularosa Basin with their promise of relief to meet the mountains and change to electric blue. I knew from the smell of the ground it was going to rain here high above the lava flows and white sands to the west and the scrub desert of the Pecos River valley to the east.

My future home is on land that is defined by its stark contrast from the surrounding deserts. It is a high altitude sanctuary for bear, elk, wild turkey, and mountain lions isolated in these mountains among stands of pine, aspen and juniper. It is a place where trout swim in shallow pools of clear running streams deepened by snowmelt in the spring. And a place where weary travelers like me might look towards their future in the thin air of this massive oasis, clean and quiet above empty flatlands.

Arriving on my land 20 minutes later, I carried the tree to a meadow near the road where there were juniper and piñon trees. I hoped someday to see a large ponderosa pine standing by a corral there. The rain came as expected as I dug away the yellow grass and excavated the place for the tree, which now lay living still near my feet. The upper two inches of the soil broke slowly to the shovel as I jumped with both feet onto the back of the blade. As the surface broke away to the softer soil beneath, I could see the hard brown ground streaked with white where the shovel cleaved it cleanly. I dug in a wide circle, struggling to get deeper. Large drops, hard and cool, smacked the back of my neck and my hat and, after a time, softened the ground slightly. It was a good time to plant.

I think a tree is like an investment in the future. In growth and permanence. This five acres is where I choose to live in my future. Where strong trees sink stiff roots into the hard ground at 7,000 feet. And the smell of juniper, piñon, and ponderosa pine scent the freshening air.

I thought my life had been like this. I’d been digging in hardscrabble dirt in ever widening circles, just like now. But I’d never invested much in one place. Never planted much. I’d just left much behind. Sometimes regretfully, and sometimes gladly. I grew up without a geographic connection to a place called home. My father traveled to find work. And I followed in his footsteps. A young life spent out on the road. Working in the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Traveling further still when I had the money to go. At 44, now I tell people I live in Houston, but I mostly live in hotels, running to catch the next plane to spend the weekend with my family there.

The circular hole was widening to accept my small, hard-gained tree, but it was not yet deep enough to hold the roots. I once equated the hard widening of my experiences with the purpose of my life. I believed wisdom is only gained by experience. But a wide excavation is not always a deep one. Not the kind where, given time, roots weave intricately into the earth, mining it for nourishment and growth. Finding illumination by standing still in the delicate certainty of being in the right place. I moved the shovel to the center and began to dig down.

There was a jagged double flash of lightning on the mountains above, electric white bolts against the dark blue of the storm. It was followed in a few seconds by a crack of thunder, then the spattering of the rain intensified. My wet shirt stuck to my back, the hole soaked up the water, and the moistened soil gave slightly, reluctantly to the shovel.

I paused for breath as the thunder rushed away down the valleys to the east where rolling hills lay expectantly. Behind the thunder there was stillness and a sense of waiting for the next wave of the storm to come down from the mountains above. But nothing came, just a lull in the air where I paused in my planting, a quiet spot under the sky on my land, and . . . expectation. A shaft of clear mountain light broke from the high clouds and illuminated the land where I stood in my tiny endeavor. I listened to the rain hitting the grass and the trees, and heard nothing else under the vast turbulent sky.

I looked uphill to where I will build my house someday, among large pines on a rocky outcropping. I hoped to see an elk or deer sheltering in the shadows, perhaps. But there was only the rain, quietly spattering the grass. I turned again to my digging.

Finally, I stood the tree in its new place, cut the wraps, and pushed the taproot into the ground of its new home. It will be fine to see the day when this ponderosa pine is tall enough to shelter me from the rain. I watched clear rain water beading and dripping from the light green needles on the branches, and silently wished my tree to grow well in its new place. I ran my hand softly along a stem of pine needles and felt their pliant response in my palm.

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Ruidoso, New Mexico Photo courtesy Ruidoso Convention and Visitors Bureau

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.

Sierra Blanca, 12,003 feet (originally known as Baldy), towers above the surrounding country and is home to Ski Apache, owned by the nearby Mescalero Indians. The cool pines and summer showers bid welcome to lowland residents who come to escape the heat, many from Texas. Texas twang and Texas license plates abound on the streets of Ruidoso. The jet planes that are parked at the Sierra Blanca Airport, built in 1986 on the Fort Stanton Mesa, also have Texas as a home base.

Ruidoso’s oldest building is the Old Mill, originally known as Dowlin’s Mill, as that was the name of the settlement. The mill is a famous landmark on Sudderth Drive dating from Civil War days. Other buildings along this six-mile main street are of varied and eclectic architecture, some painted in eye-catching lavenders, yellows, and turquoises or left in rustic wood exteriors.

Another intriguing landmark is the upside down sign of the now defunct Wild Snail Restaurant. It is often used as a point of departure when giving tourists directions to another part of town. Though the restaurant has been gone since the early 1970s, the fact that the sign is still there and in its upside down position attests to the unpretentiousness of the town.

Adjacent to Ruidoso to the east, but a separate community, is Ruidoso Downs. Next door to the Downs is a place called Hollywood. During the Depression of the 1930s, lots for cabins were sold for as little as $59.50. Hollywood has since been swallowed by Ruidoso Downs although it still has a thriving post office. The race track is located in the Downs as is the Museum of the Horse. Nearing completion is a visitors’ center for Billy the Kid Country.

Nearby points of interest include the Inn of the Mountain Gods and the Mescalero Indian Reservation, the historic town of Lincoln, Capitan, home of Smokey the Bear; the Merchant Marine and Military Cemetery at Ft. Stanton, Spencer Theater, White Sands National Monument, Alamogordo Space Center; and Sunspot, home of the largest observatory in the world.

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The Old Dowlin Mill in Ruidoso, New Mexico
Photo by Frederic Moras

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.

Dowlin and his brother William salvaged what they could from the ruined mill and rebuilt on higher ground. Safety came at a price; now it was difficult to divert enough water to operate the mill. The brothers built a three-mile long flume system – V-shaped wooden troughs, supported by long poles and tree branches, that carried the water to the mill.

In 1877, Dowlin sold a half interest in the mill to Frank Lesnett, another Fort Stanton veteran. Lesnett’s wife Annie traveled by train, stagecoach and wagon from Chicago to her new frontier home. She later described her first impressions of the beautiful countryside, and then mentions almost casually that when she and her husband arrived at the mill, there was blood on the front yard. Paul Dowlin had been shot and killed the day before.

Annie Lesnett enjoyed life in New Mexico. She gave doughnuts and cookies to the Mescalero Apaches who came to the mill. One of her frequent visitors was Geronimo. One night, a mountain lion roared outside the mill, forcing the family to barricade the door.

Farmers from the surrounding area brought their grain to the mill, which also housed a general store and post office. It was one of the few mills that could grind grain and cut lumber. The Lesnetts raised hogs, turkeys and chickens. In the fall, more than 100 hogs would be butchered in the mill yard.

In the 1930s a hardwood floor was installed and weekly dances were held for several years. It was about this time that the great wheel stopped turning.

The building was abandoned and nearly in ruins when Carmon Phillips bought it in 1949. He hired a local man to make new adobe bricks and rebuild the back wall. The outside of the building is plastered but the interior whitewashed walls show the texture of the adobe.

The great wheel, its shaft broken, was rotted and sunk into the ground. Phillips salvaged pieces of redwood from a water tank at an abandoned gold mine and used them to rebuild the wheel.

He opened a gift shop in the historic building, whose cool interior provides a welcome escape from the summer heat. Visitors can watch the millstones grind corn meal and wheat flour, which are sold in paper sacks with printed recipes attached.

Phillips died in 1999 but his daughter, actress Delana Micheals, continues to welcome visitors and share stories of “days gone by.”

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