We took off without showers today, Laurie because she forgot her shower bag in the camper when she trekked off to the shower room (amazing, I know....) and Art just because he didn't feel like a shower this morning. We got a pretty early start therefore and stopped in town to do some grocery shopping and to hit a Starbucks before hitting the road. We planned a relatively long day (for us anyways), so wanted to hit it as early as we could.
The drive from Las Cruces, which is about 2/3 the way towards the western border of New Mexico, to Benson, which is about 90 miles into eastern Arizona, is through largely desert landscape with sawtooth-looking mountains off in the distance on both sides of I-10.
Our route today followed I-10 until we reached Willcox, Arizona, where we turned southeast and followed route 181 back to our one sightseeing destination of the day: the Chiricahua National Monument, a place we had never heard of but stumbled up on in our research of the route last night.
The Chiricahua park is about 35 miles off of I-10, but it takes closer to an hour to get in there. Then you drive back into the park to the Visitors Center which is another 20 minutes or so. We really didn't know exactly what to expect but we saw a few neat looking photos on line and decided to give it a try. What a worthwhile journey.
The Chiricahua Monument is a geological wonder. (Here is a link to the Wikipedia web page on the park: http://wikitravel.org/en/Chiricahua_National_Monument)It is also full of history, particularly between the Chiricahua band of the Apaches (of which Geronimo and Cochise were a part) and white settlers moving west in the 1800s.
Interestingly, the park literature doesn't have much on the epic battles that were waged here, the lives lost, nor the valiant stand the Chiricahuas made to defend this territory. The Visitors Center had a few books and we are going to try to see if we can find one of those to read more about the people part of the history. 
We did find one history of the area in an online format, so we downloaded that and are reading it. It follows the lives of a young Swedish couple, one a soldier and the other an officer's family servant, who married and settled here, homesteading a ranch they called Faraway Ranch in 1885. 
Two generation of Erickson-Riggs lived on the ranch, and we noticed that the conservation ranger is named Riggs, so he must be a descendent. Presumably we are going to get into some of their interactions with the native Americans in this story, but we haven't gotten there yet. It seems like most of the fighting for the area was over by the time the Ericksons built their ranch, but we haven't gotten to that part of the story yet....
The geology of the park is very well documented on the other hand. The park is known for the strangely shaped rock formations, particularly at the upper elevations of the land, that were formed by volcanic upwelling action about 25 million years ago. The result is a stunning array of red rocks clumped together, balancing on one another, and forming amazing groups that resemble all kinds of things you can imagine. In addition to the Organ Pipe, Sea Captain, and China Boy rocks, we are pretty sure we saw Precious Pup. We would definitely recommend this as a stop to anyone passing through the vicinity. 
It is a ways off the Interstate, but it is well worth the drive and the surrounding countryside is beautiful. We've included a few photos here although we (Laurie) must have taken a hundred.After we left the park we headed for Benson, Arizona, where our KOA campground was. We took the backroads and completed the loop out of the park, south, then west, through a little town called Dragoon and back to I-10. It was only another ten miles or so down the road to Benson and about THE worst KOA we have ever stayed at. More about that tomorrow. Tonight we threw together a taco salad for dinner and called it a day. On to California tomorrow. Pepé can't wait.
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