Camping in Rural Clayton, New Mexico

I'm in north-eastern New Mexico near a town called Clayton driving as the GPS tells me towards a New Mexico state park where I can camp for the night. This part of the rural midwest is stunningly beautiful if you can appreciate the kind of beauty whose soundtrack is mostly that of silence interrupted only occasionally by birds chirping, the soft rustle of grass in the wind and a rusty, creaky windmill pumping water for the cattle at its base.




When I finally arrive, I find a sunken valley in otherwise flat, barren grazing land. The valley is the state park with narrow winding dirt roads surrounding a calm man-made lake in the middle of what seems like nowhere.

When I imagine what my next camp site is going to be, it is usually a variation of something I've seen before. "Camping lake" on a map suggests a basic lake with some pine trees around it on a gradual slope and some camp sites nearby the trees. This is nothing like that, nothing I could have imagined. The sun is going down so I've got a clock ticking but I take the time to drive around in search of the best spot. The one I end up choosing is on a terrace overlooking most of the lake, the fishing pier and other campsites below. This is a pleasant surprise.