City of Rocks State Park

Out on the grassland between Deming and Silver City, a cluster of gray and pinkish pillars and boulders rises like a town seen from far off, some of them forty feet tall, with sandy lanes running between them. The rock is tuff. Some 34.9 million years ago an eruption at the Emory caldera, in the southern Black Range to the east, sent ash, pumice and hot gas across this country as a racing cloud that settled so hot it welded into solid stone. That eruption was more than a thousand times larger than Mount St. Helens in 1980. As the rock cooled it cracked along joints, and freeze and thaw, wind and the roots of plants have been widening the cracks ever since.

The layer is called the Kneeling Nun Tuff, after a spire of the same rock that stands above the copper pit at Santa Rita, a short drive to the north.

The park was set aside in 1952. Campsites are tucked in among the rocks, and a desert botanical garden sits by the visitor center. It is an International Dark Sky Park, and the Gene and Elisabeth Simon Observatory, the first built in a New Mexico state park, holds a 14-inch telescope used for public star programs. Mimbres people lived along the nearby valleys, and Faywood Hot Springs is a couple of miles away.