The Gila Country — Silver City, the Cliff Dwellings & the Mining Frontier

Three and a half hours northwest of El Paso, southwestern New Mexico's Gila country climbs from Chihuahuan Desert into cool ponderosa highlands, cradling a landscape layered with a thousand years of human history. Silver City grew rich from silver and copper in the 1870s, weathered floods that carved a river through its own main street, and reinvented itself as a bohemian arts town while keeping its Victorian downtown intact — and it sits at the edge of the vast Gila Wilderness, the first designated wilderness area in the world. This three-day journey braids the region's deep past and its frontier boom: the Mimbres pottery of the WNMU Museum, whose black-on-white designs are among the most striking of ancient North America; the Gila Cliff Dwellings, where the Mogollon people built stone rooms into canyon caves seven centuries ago; the old gold camp of Pinos Altos; and the immense open-pit copper mines and Buffalo Soldier fort that made this the industrial engine of the territory. Overnights in Silver City, base camp for the whole Gila.