Seventeen miles north of Tularosa, a paved county road leaves US-54 and runs five miles east toward the Sacramento Mountains to a low, dark ridge of basalt. The Jornada Mogollon people who farmed the valley below pecked through the weathered coating of the rock to make more than 21,000 images: masks and faces, sunbursts, bighorn sheep, birds, fish, insects, handprints and geometric designs. Sierra Blanca, about 12,000 feet, stands over the ridge to the east.
The Bureau of Land Management keeps Three Rivers as one of the few sites in the Southwest set aside solely for its rock art, and one of the few where visitors walk right among the images. The Petroglyph Trail starts at a shade shelter and climbs about half a mile along the ridge, rocky and uneven, past many of the densest panels; a printed guide numbers the stops.
Across the road a shorter, flat trail leads to the village the carvers most likely lived in. It was occupied for some four hundred years and partly excavated in 1976, and it shows the foundations of three kinds of buildings, among them pithouses, some of them rebuilt.
A small campground with shade shelters sits beside the trailhead. Pets are allowed in the campground but not on the trails, and the images are to be looked at and photographed, never touched or chalked.
The closest stops worth working into your route