Motto, It Grows as It Goes

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State bird, roadrunner.   State flower, yucca.   State tree, piñon.

The defining feature of New Mexico is its adobe architecture even seen in shopping malls, homes and most buildings.

The state is famous for its Pueblo Indian villages and cliff dwellings.

New Mexico is still as the old west, in it's features.
Bill the Kid was a legend, in New Mexico. He fought in the Lincoln county cattle wars, and was finally killed by Sheriff Pat Garret at age 21.
Many Movies have been made about the incident.
Billy the Kids grave stands behind the Old Fort Sumner Museum

Northern New Mexico centers on the magnificent landscapes of the Rio Grande Valley , which contains its two finest cities: Santa Fe , the adobe fronted capital, and the artists' colony and winter resort of Taos , with its nearby pueblo. More than a dozen Pueblo villages can be found in the mountainous area between the two, while to the west lie the evocative ancient ruins at Bandelier and Puyé . The deep Carlsbad Caverns are the main attraction, while you can still stumble upon old mining and cattle-ranching towns that have somehow hung on since the end of the Wild West.

One of the very most famous towns in New Mexico is Roswell. Roswell is where a flying saucer is suppose to have crashed July 4th 1947.
The US Government says it was just a weather balloon, but there are many TV shows about Roswell who seem to believe it was a real flying saucer complete with bodies of aliens. Who knows, but its and interesting thought. Many: Books, Movies, TV shows are about the Roswell incident.
Seventy-five miles north of Carlsbad, the small ranching town of ROSWELL is renowned because an alien spaceship supposedly crash-landed nearby on July 4, 1947. The commander of the local air force base authorized a press statement announcing that they had retrieved the wreckage of a flying saucer, and despite a follow-up denial within a day - claiming that it was in fact a weather balloon - the story has kept running. In 1997, as 100,000 X-Files fanatics descended upon Roswell for a six-day festival to mark the "Incident's" fiftieth anniversary, the US government revealed that the errant weather balloon had crashed while monitoring the atmosphere for evidence of Soviet nuclear tests. Nonetheless, their imaginations further stimulated by the TV series Roswell High , UFO theorists remain unconvinced.

Despite its best intentions, and the wishful thinking of the truly weird clientele who drift in from the plains, the central International UFO Museum , 114 N Main St (daily: May-Sept 9am-5pm, Oct-April 10am-5pm; free), inadvertently exposes the whole tawdry business as transparent nonsense. Its showpiece is a model of the notorious "alien autopsy"; built for the movie Roswell , you can't help suspecting it was also featured in the grainy "documentary" autopsy footage that created a brief international sensation in 1995.

By way of contrast, the longstanding Roswell Museum , 100 W 11th St (Mon-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; free), boasts an excellent, multifaceted collection with nary an alien corpse to be seen. Its most sensational section celebrates pioneer rocket scientist Robert Goddard (1882-1945), while historical artifacts elsewhere range from armor and pikes brought by Spanish conquistadors to astronaut Harrison Schmitt's spacesuit. A huge gallery also displays Southwestern art by Henriette Wyeth, Peter Hurd and Georgia O'Keeffe.

Roswell's visitor center is at 426 N Main St (Mon-Sat 9am-5pm; tel 505/624-0889, ). The finest motel in town, the Best Western Sally Port Inn , 2000 N Main St (tel 505/622-6430 or 1-800/600-5221; $100-130), also has a good restaurant ; the Super 8 , 3575 N Main St (tel 505/622-8886 or 1-800/800-8000; $50-75), and the Frontier Motel , 3010 N Main St (tel 505/622-1400 or 1-800/678-1401; $35-50), are cheaper.
 

Although to most travelers central New Mexico is an area to be raced through as quickly as possible, it does hold isolated pockets of interest, with the scenery, at least in the west, the main attraction. Dozens of all-American small towns hang on to the last remnants of Route 66 , the winding old "Chicago-to-LA" transcontinental highway which has by and large been superseded by high-speed Interstate 40.

Albuquerque - New Mexico's largest city, with a third of the state's population - sits dead center, at the intersection of I-40 and I-25. It's also a main stop for Amtrak and Greyhound, and holds New Mexico's only major airport . Though the area east of Albuquerque , stretching along I-40 toward Texas, is among the most desolate parts of the Southwest, one or two towns merit a quick detour off the interstate, thanks largely to Wild West heroes such as Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. The mountainous region to the west of Albuquerque has more to see - above all Ácoma Pueblo , the mesa-top community known as "Sky City."

The mountainous north is the New Mexico of popular imagination, with its pastel colors, vivid desert landscape and adobe architecture. Even Santa Fe , the one real city is, with well under 100,000 residents, hardly metropolitan in scale, and the narrow streets of its small, historic center, though thronged with tourists, retain the feel of bygone days. Ranging along the headwaters of the Rio Grande 75 miles northeast, the amiable frontier town of Taos - immortalized by Georgia O'Keeffe and D.H.Lawrence - is remarkable chiefly for the stacked dwellings of neighboring Taos Pueblo .

An hour's drive west from Taos or Santa Fe brings you to Bandelier National Monument , where ancient cliff dwellings were carved out of the same forested volcanic plateau that now holds the eerie Los Alamos National Weapons Laboratory . Alternatively, the hills to the east of the Rio Grande hold a succession of characterful Hispanic hamlets, strung along a scenic mountain highway known as the High Road .

Most of the travelers who come to southern New Mexico are here to visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park . Crassly commercialized it may be, but, like the Grand Canyon, it's too amazing a geological spectacle to miss. Northwest of Carlsbad, the Sacramento and Jicarilla mountains - home to the MescaleroApache reservation as well as some rough-and-ready resorts with alpine settings to match Taos - rise from the desert plains once roamed by Billy the Kid and other Wild West heroes. The desolate dunes of the White Sands - half national park, half missile and bombing range - spread west of the mountains with the rolling hills of the Rio Grande Valley beyond. The little-visited southwest corner is among the most attractive reaches of the Southwest, with dozens more ghost towns and some fine scenery, plus the undisturbed pre-Columbian remains of the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument .

Since the early 1980s, SANTA FE has ranked among the chic-est destinations in the US, regularly voted the country's most popular city by upmarket travelers. That appeal rests on a very solid basis: it's one of America's oldest and most beautiful cities, founded by Spanish missionaries as their northernmost colonial capital in 1609, a full ten years before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock. Spread across a high plateau at the foot of the stunning Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico's capital still glories in the adobe houses and baroque churches of its original architects, while its newer museums and galleries attract art-lovers from all over the world.

As upward of a million and a half tourists every year descend upon a town of just sixty thousand inhabitants, Santa Fe has inevitably grown somewhat overblown; long-term residents bemoan what's been lost, while first-time visitors are inclined to wonder what all the fuss is about. The urban sprawl as you approach from the interstate makes for a lousy introduction, while the rigorous insistence that every downtown building should look like a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial palace takes a bit of getting used to. This is the only city in the world where what at first glance appears to be a perfectly preserved ancient adobe turns out to be a high-rise parking lot, and it would be illegal to build a gas station that didn't resemble an Indian prayer chamber.

There's still a lot to like about Santa Fe, however, with its compact, peaceful downtown and walkable streets. Though Santa Fe style may have become something of a cliché, that cliché is changing; the pastel-painted, wooden coyotes that were the obligatory souvenir ten years ago have, for example, been replaced by cast-iron sculptures of Kokopelli, the hunch-backed Ancestral Puebloan flute-player. In a town where the Yellow Pages list over 250 art galleries, you'll get plenty of opportunities to buy one.

The long line of truck stops, diners and motels at TUCUMCARI , the biggest town between Albuquerque and Amarillo, Texas, has made it a favorite I-40 pit stop, punctuated with neon signs. During the day you can while away an hour at the mind-boggling Tucumcari Historical Research Institute Museum , at 416 S Adams St (Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 1-6pm; $2), which boasts one of the world's greatest collections of barbed wire. Literally hundreds of inexpensive rooms lie along this stretch of old Route 66; the Rodeway Inn East , 1023 E Tucumcari Blvd (tel 505/461-0360; $35-50), is a cut above the many cheaper dives. The Big Dipper , 101 Second St at Main (tel 505/461-4430), is an appealingly old-fashioned downtown diner.

FORT SUMNER , south of I-40 some way short of Tucumcari, means different things to different people. To the Navajo, it's where frontiersman and US Army colonel Kit Carson dragged them in 1864 after destroying their orchards and burning their villages in Arizona. What little is left of the reservation is now the Fort Sumner State Monument , seven miles east of the modern town (daily 8.30am-5pm; $1). To Wild West fanatics, Fort Sumner is a pilgrimage spot because legendary outlaw Billy the Kid was gunned down here by Pat Garrett in 1881. His grave stands behind the Old Fort Sumner Museum (daily 9am-5pm; $3), his tombstone shielded from memento-seekers by a steel cage.