Lincoln National Forest

National Forest, Roughly 1.1 Million Acres Across The Sacramento, Guadalupe And Capitan Mountains; The Original Smokey Bear Was A Real Cub Rescued From A 1950 Fire In The Capitans, And The White Mountain Wilderness And Sitting Bull Falls Are Inside It · Cloudcroft, New Mexico

Lincoln National Forest covers about 1.1 million acres in three separate mountain blocks in southern New Mexico, and the surprise is how little it looks like the desert around it. The Sacramento Mountains above Alamogordo climb from white gypsum and yucca to ponderosa and aspen in half an hour of driving, with the Victorian resort village of Cloudcroft at 8,600 feet on top. The Capitan Mountains to the north are where a badly burned bear cub was pulled out of a 1950 wildfire and became Smokey Bear, a real animal who then lived at the National Zoo for 26 years. The Guadalupe district to the south is limestone, cave country and continuous with Carlsbad Caverns, and holds Sitting Bull Falls, a 150-foot spring-fed waterfall in what is otherwise desert. Sierra Blanca, at 11,981 feet on the adjoining Mescalero Apache land, is the southernmost peak of that height in the United States, and it is visible from the white sands eighty miles away.

NM Highway 82, Cloudcroft, Cloudcroft, New Mexico, 88317, United States

Open all year, day and night, with no gate and no entrance station. Ranger district offices at Cloudcroft, Ruidoso and Carlsbad keep weekday daytime hours. Sitting Bull Falls day-use area has gate hours and a fee and closes in the evening. Developed campgrounds are seasonal, generally May to October. Snow closes the higher Sacramento Mountain roads in winter, and fire restrictions and area closures are routine from March through June.

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