Forest Road 144, or 31 Mile Road

97TJNM

High Desert Redneck
Supporting Member
Joined
Oct 24, 2021
Messages
822
Location
Los Alamos, NM
Thursday me and @WHBNM were emailing back and forth. I invited him to join me wheeling next weekend, but he has other plans scheduled. Instead, he told me he had been thinking of taking forest road 144 (known locally as 31 mile road... I don't know why, because it was around 56 miles long) from the Jemez mountains to the Espanola Valley. It's a forest road and not too technical (I only needed 4wd for about 3 miles of the trip, and never engaged my lockers), but the scenery is beautiful and the road is rutted and rocky enough to make you go slow and take in your surroundings.

We started off about 9:30am, and our first stop was about 30 minutes in, before we hit the forest road at the Valles Caldera, where the Walt Longmire series was filmed. We stopped at an overlook and glassed for elk. We saw 2 herds, about 100 head each.
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We cruised for a bit, mostly typical forest road, rutted and rocky, but pretty.
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We stopped for lunch in a nice open glade and ate. My wife and @WHBNM 's son was with us. We explored a bit, and got back in the jeeps.
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not 500 yards down the road, we got into the only "wheeling" on the trip, about 3 miles of ruts and rock fields with rocks ranging from softball to basketball size. It took almost an hour to go those 3 miles.
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After the road smoothed back out some, we came to an amazing senic overlook, and you could see all the way to Taos (Over an hour drive on the highways).
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We cruised some more, and saw a lot of other awesome scenery.

About 4:30 pm we hit blacktop again in the Espanola Valley having gone over 10k feet in elevation.
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I had a blast, and we are hoping to hook up more to go wheeling together soon!
 
It was a great day!

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One of the coolest things about this forum is finding good people to hit the trails with. Sometimes they are a stones throw away.

As usual, our pictures don't do it justice. Likely our last topless, half door cruise of the year here at 7200'!