Riders taking the 64-mile, narrow-gauge line can sit back and hear the howl of the old train’s whistle and see the old steam locomotive’s trail of black smoke as it plods along a high-country route. Many consider Chama to be the trip’s highlight. This tiny town located about 10 miles south of the Colorado border sits next to a picturesque valley below the peaks of the San Juan Mountains.
All aboard: The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad takes visitors into the past to relive an era when steam-powered locomotives and the trains they hauled were an essential part of the real Old West.
Billy the Kid Museum Fort Sumner, a small eastern New Mexico town where Henry McCarty, aka “Billy the Kid,” spent his final days, offers several interesting sites, not the least of which is the legendary bad boy’s final resting place at the Old Fort Sumner Museum. It’s said that Billy, who was about 5 feet, 8 inches tall, loved music and dancing, along with robbing and killing. At the nearby Fort Sumner State Monument is the old Maxwell house, where 21-year-old Billy was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881.

Grave news: The Kid’s tombstone reads, “The Boy Bandit King. He Died As He Had Lived.”
International UFO

Museum at Roswell Eastern New Mexico’s Roswell hit the tourist lotto in November 1992, with the opening of the International UFO Museum and Research Center. This largely agricultural community has become a magnet for the UFO curious, who search for the truth about a purported UFO crash northwest of town in 1947. This monument to the event has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world. The museum occupies a former movie theater downtown and claims to be a worldwide center for UFO information, as well as a good place to buy an alien bobble head and silkscreened survivor cap.
Truth seekers: Roswell’s International UFO Museum and Research Center has become the clearinghouse for UFO-related phenomena.
Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument More than 700 years ago, a mysterious band of migrating Indians, probably numbering fewer than 60, established a tenuous foothold on the West Fork of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico. Their new home wasn’t on the water; it was 180 feet above in a series of large caves. In the caves, the cliff dwellers constructed 40 rooms, crafting their quarters from nearby stone, mud mortar and timber.

But less than 50 years later, the cliff dwellers were gone, abruptly abandoning their homes and fields. Some archaeologists believe the retreat was triggered by drought, but no one knows for sure.