Sands, Caverns & Santa Fe: A New Mexico Road Trip

Touch down in Phoenix, collect your car and head south through the Sonoran Desert as the first saguaros appear along the roadside en route to Tucson

Tucson’s history is best told through its food. As a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, its kitchens draw on the Tohono O’odham people, Spanish missionaries, Mexican ranchers and frontier settlers. A guided food walking tour lets you taste that story bite by bite, from Sonoran hot dogs to prickly pear treats. Spend a morning among the towering cacti of Saguaro National Park, then visit the gleaming Mission San Xavier del Bac, known locally as the White Dove of the Desert. After rain, the scent of creosote drifts through the desert evening.

Cross into New Mexico and feel the pace soften as Las Cruces comes into view beneath the jagged Organ Mountains, just minutes from Old Mesilla, whose adobe shops and cantinas line the very plaza where Billy the Kid once stood trial. Settle in at the Hotel Encanto with a plate of green chile grown just up the valley in Hatch, then save the late afternoon for White Sands National Park, where gypsum dunes stretch to the horizon and stay cool beneath your feet even in summer. Linger until sunset as the sand turns from white to rose to lavender, and silence settles over the dunes as the first stars appear.

Climb from the desert floor into the pine-scented Sacramento Mountains and through the mountain village of Cloudcroft, before dropping onto the open plains towards Carlsbad and one of the world’s great cave systems hidden beneath the Chihuahuan Desert. Walk down through the Natural Entrance of Carlsbad Caverns into the Big Room, a vast chamber hung with stalactites and delicate soda straws, where the shadows seem to go on forever. Between late spring and autumn, gather at dusk as hundreds of thousands of bats spiral out into the evening sky, while below ground the air stays cool, still and utterly silent.

Head north across the plains to Roswell, where alien-eyed streetlights and the International UFO Museum keep the famous 1947 story alive, before continuing to Albuquerque as the Sandia Mountains blush pink at sunset (sandía means watermelon). Rise before dawn for a hot air balloon ride, drifting silently above the Rio Grande valley as the city wakes beneath you, then wander the adobe lanes of Old Town and discover the art and traditions of New Mexico’s 19 Pueblos at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. As Route 66’s neon signs flicker into life along Central Avenue, the night air carries the smell of roasting chile back to Hotel Chaco.

Leave the highway behind and follow the High Road to Taos through villages where Spanish colonial traditions still shape daily life, pausing in Chimayó for its adobe sanctuary and centuries-old weaving workshops before climbing through Truchas as the Sangre de Cristo peaks fill the windscreen. In Taos, step inside Taos Pueblo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the Taos people have lived in the same multi-storey adobe homes for more than a thousand years, then stand on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge as the river glints some 200 metres below. Wander the plaza and galleries of a town that has drawn artists for over a century, before returning to El Monte Sagrado as the evening brings a deep hush and a sky thick with stars.

Cross into Colorado through the wide San Luis Valley, taking the detour to Great Sand Dunes National Park, where the tallest dunes in North America rise against snow-capped peaks. Arrive in Colorado Springs for a final evening at Flying Horse Resort & Club, with the Rockies on the horizon and the last scent of pine on the cool mountain air.

Spend your final morning among the red sandstone fins of the Garden of the Gods, with Pikes Peak rising behind, before the short drive to Denver for your flight home as the Rockies fade beneath the wing.