Roadside New Mexico

The people, geological features, and historic events that have made New Mexico what it is today are commemorated in over 350 historic markers along the state's roads. This guide, arranged geographically, beginning with the Four Corners region, is designed to fill in the gaps and answer the questions those markers provoke, offering the additional information that the interested traveller is sure to want. Geological and scenic markers for the Rio Grande, the Colorado Plateau, and such uniquely New Mexican features as the Jornada del Muerto and the Valles Caldera explicate the state's physical landscape. The presence of early human inhabitants is marked at Blackwater Draw, the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and Aztec and Salmon ruins, among other spots. Most pueblos and tribes have markers, and the early incursions of the Spanish are commemorated as well as Spanish and Mexican settlement patterns. The American occupation is marked at forts, battlefields, and survey points. Missions, trails, ghost towns, battle sites, settlements, and outlaws are all represented with markers, as are such symbols of New Mexico as the Santa Fe Opera and Smokey the Bear.

David Pike grew up in Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and earned a bachelor of arts degree from New Mexico State University and a master's degree in non-fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. He resides in Washington DC.