One last recommendation before we let you go, and it costs nothing.
Northern New Mexico has some of the darkest skies left in the United States. There is very little population up here, very little light, the elevation puts you above a good deal of the atmosphere, and the air is exceptionally dry — which is precisely the combination astronomers spend money chasing.
So tonight, wherever you are staying on this loop, go outside. Get away from the porch light, give your eyes a full twenty minutes to adjust — that part matters more than people think, and looking at your phone resets the clock — and look up.
From spring through autumn the Milky Way comes up as a genuine river of light with visible dark lanes in it. If you have only ever seen it in photographs, the real thing at nine thousand feet is a different experience.
Some of the people whose descendants still live in this valley were reading that sky for a thousand years before anyone drove a road around this mountain.
Bring a warm layer. Even in July it goes cold up here at night, fast, and that is what sends most people back indoors before the good part.
That is everything, and it is the cheapest thing we will recommend to you all day. Go and look at the sky.
Photo: John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA · CC BY 2.0