#2: [07-Sep-15]

#1: [27-Sep-01]

17-Mar-2025 --

I felt very happy to return to the Land of Enchantment for a couple days of sightseeing and hiking, and tagging on a confluence visit made a great side quest. New Mexico has become one of my favorite states in the country, so getting my first New Mexican confluence was decidedly overdue. The views at this very particular spot probably won't inspire many prospective tourists, but I can assure you that there's a lot more to northeast New Mexico than meets the eye in our photos here. In any case, it was a greatly appreciated stop along our journey: this confluence got us off the road and into a nearly untouched environment for a little bit.

36N 104W lies in the heart of Harding County, the least populous in New Mexico and the 7th least densely populated in the continental United States. The highways out there are exceptionally empty and the horizons exceptionally expansive (see this photo, taken 6 km northwest of 36N 104W) — there are few places I feel quite as free and untethered from day-to-day worries. During a combined 44 mi/70 km stretch of driving before and after our confluence visit (along NM 120 between US 412 and the town of Roy, NM), we only passed one or two other vehicles and one confused prairie antelope. NM 120 made a perfect route for the day: we were heading west out of Clayton en route to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains but needed to dip south to hit 36N 104W, precisely how the highway was drawn out!

We came to our dirt road turn off the highway a couple miles (~3 km) north of the target latitude, a ranch entrance (like virtually all highway-intersecting roads are out here). This road was in pretty good shape and we made it to our confluence trailhead without incident, passing through a few cattle guards. Before even leaving the car, I recognized the old prairie house described in the previous two visits, nicely positioned along the way we'd be walking — a living history exhibit of sorts. (Or as I'd have preferred to believe, the abandoned remnants of the "36N 104W Welcome Center".)

From where we parked the car (just north of a bend in the road), we had a slightly over half-mile (900 m) walk to our destination. With no major obstacles in the way or crops to worry about trampling, it was easy work walking a nearly pencil-straight line to our goal (perhaps the easiest straight-line confluence walk I've done that took longer than a minute). While it didn't look like it at first, there were actually some subtle signs of human activity in that field (outside of the prairie house) — we encountered the occasional piece of rusty barbed wire hidden in the grass, and part of our walk followed what seemed to be a lightly used vehicle track.

By the time Bailey and I reached the final hundred meters to the confluence, the dirt road was hidden behind a small ridge and our surroundings were now nearly devoid of anything but scrub, shrubs, and open sky (see our south-facing view at the spot). The GPS decimals continued to tick down for a few more moments before easily zeroing out at a non-descript point in the field — we'd reached 36N 104W, Bailey's first confluence and my first in New Mexico! It was a perfect time to be out there: on this early spring morning, the temperature had warmed into the upper 60s (~20°C) under deep blue skies. Only the sound of a gentle breeze punctuated the otherwise silent environment (there were no noise-making bugs, birds, or bovines anywhere to be seen). Although not the most objectively exciting landscape, there was a real beauty in the remarkable emptiness and stillness of our spot.

After enjoying a couple peaceful minutes at the point, we started back for the car. The entire visit took about a half-hour, and soon Bailey and I were back on the road westbound. We ended up following NM 120 to its western terminus in the southern Rockies — over the next couple hours, we gradually climbed out of the high plains, and before long the highway turned into a gorgeous winding one-lane dirt road deep in the mountains. The scenery from end-to-end impressed me enough that I'd now consider it among my all-time favorite state highways (100% would recommend outside of the winter months). Couldn't have asked for a better day!