By Scott Shephard

When Deb and I were planning out trip to New Mexico, Arizona and SW Texas, I briefly made the case for taking our camper. My idea was that we would camp part of the time and stay at AirBNB houses the rest of the time. Deb was not so certain about this plan given that she thought we would have winter driving conditions both going and returning.

As usual, she was right: the day we left both major snow storms and unusually cold conditions were forecast through every state we were planning to visit. Even El Paso, Texas, the most southern point of our trip, wasn’t safe from cold and snow. We ended up being snowbound in a hotel in Albuquerque, NM, for two nights. And we know what happened in Texas because of the cold.

Weather aside, I learned that if you plan to stay in “civilized” campgrounds in this part of the USA, you need to reserve your places months in advance. (One campground host we talked to in Arizona said that making reservations a year in advance was the general practice.) Long term planning is far too left brained for me. I don’t know what I’m doing two weeks from now! (And I really don’t want to know.)

Finally, if you want to avoid the problem with reservations, you could boondock, which is defined as “dispersed dry camping on public lands.” There is no electricity, no water, no toilets and no dump stations but there is plenty of public land in the western and southwestern parts of the USA, generally Bureau of Land Management land. And our camper is a self-contained unit, after all.

In this photo, you are looking at BLM land and scattered boondockers just east of Las Cruces, NM, near the Organ Pipe Mountains. I would enjoy this kind of camping - but only once and a while. Deb would tolerate it but prefers an electrical hookup so we can use the microwave without feeling guilty. We have batteries and solar panels, but microwaves are energy hogs. And so is our built-in propane heater. (It got down to 30˚ here two nights ago and they had several inches of snow two weeks ago.) The solar system I installed works well in sunny times but can only do so much to recharge our batteries.

I hope to do some boondocking some day but the problem with this kind of camping is that there is no reservation systems at all. You can stay for up to 14 days but only on a first come, first served basis. It may be hard to tell here but there are no spaces available in this BLM location. So then what? Park in a Walmart parking lot (called Waldocking)? A Cracker Barrel restaurant? (CrackerBarreling?)? I’m not sure I would even try to convince Deb to do that.

Needless to say, we didn’t bring our camper and are staying in a house (which we have to ourselves) in Las Cruces right now and will be staying in another house in El Paso. That house has a hot tub, a swimming pool, 4 bedrooms and many other amenities - all for less per night than a Holiday Inn Express. I love my camper but its hard to beat a hot tub and the certain knowledge that the house will be there when we arrive.

Mavic 2 Pro 1/500 sec f/5.0 ISO 100

(PS: the photo you are looking at above is looking towards an area known as Dripping Springs. The mountains that give the name to this range look like this: