Cold Snow and Trees: Mayhill, NM
As we stayed in Alamogordo and watched the weather closely, as one must when RVing, we realized were were going to have to change some plans. We intended to go from Alamogordo to some BLM land just outside Carlsbad Caverns NP for a week, then spend a week at an RV park in the town of Carlsbad to regroup and continue exploring the area. However, winter storm Uri was bearing down upon NM (and practically the entire 48) and would hit right in that week we would be boondocking.
Boondocking in the snow is its own... adventure, but not one that's often worth doing on purpose. It takes a great deal of energy to keep an RV tolerably warm, and well, you really want that to come from a power pedestal, especially when it's expected to be under 20F - or in Uri's case, 0F. So it was clear we'd need to make other plans.
Uri was too large a storm to escape easily on wheels given where we were. Our best shot would be to head back to Tucson, but we were just there, and would rather not lose a week of eastward progress. So we should continue east, but to where? Kristin felt that if we're to be hunkering down for a snowstorm, let's at least do it someplace pretty. So we started looking into the nearby Lincoln National Forest, and made some calls. Turns out there's a little ski town called Cloudcroft up about 9,000 feet in the mountains between Alamogordo and Carlsbad, and several little communities strung along the pass. We found a park in the blink-and-you'll-miss-it community of Mayhill, and headed East up the mountains. It was such a treat to see trees again, and be in something forested! There were elevation changes! Rivers! This was no desert.
The pass is full of interesting sights in its own right. For many years, all the lumber in Alamogordo and much of southwest NM came from these mountains, via an unbelievably steep lumber railway with many trestles. The top of the pass is Cloudcroft, with the only schools and shops for some miles in either direction, along with its wee ski resort open on the weekends (but, as we would discover later that week, not a single grocery store). The east side is a gentler slope, with ranches and little vacation communities tucked along the highway. Mayhill is little more than a diner, post office, and an RV park about 15 minutes down the east side of the mountains.
We had the place mostly to ourselves, aside from the hunters in the tent site next door who left when the snow arrived, one other family in a travel trailer who left after the first day of snow, and to our surprise a full-time tent camper also hunkered down there for the week. The hosts were sweet and chatty, even bringing us a Valentine's day care package with decorations and chocolate.
It was a little weird that first day we arrived, setting up knowing the snow would arrive but with little except a chill breeze in the 50F air to say so. But sure enough, overnight it came. Valentine's day dawned cold and snowy, as forecasted. It was all of 16F that morning, but we were fairly warm, made waffles, and got out to enjoy the snow and make some sled runs.
The routine in cold weather is pretty specific:
Don't leave the water hose charged. Get it out to fill the fresh tank as needed, and use the tank and water pump.
Don't leave the waste valves open, or any standing water in the waste line. Dump as necessary.
Leave the tank heaters on for any non-empty tanks if it's under 30F in the evening.
Put wood under the jacks so they don't freeze to the ground
Use electric heat as desired, but be sure to use the furnace enough to keep the plumbing thawed.
Put a remote temperature sensor in the wet bay to keep an eye on temps in there
Bundle up!
Even with list in hand, I was pretty anxious. Extreme temperatures tend to test any weak spots in your setup, sometimes with big consequences. Ours turned up soon enough. Over the course of the day we noticed an unpleasant, hot smell coming from the furnace. Given that we'd been running it for many hours overnight and during the day, this wasn't a huge surprise, but it wasn't going away. I climbed into the underbelly again to inspect, but found nothing obvious. I pulled the exterior cover off the furnace and inspected the heat exchanger - nothing. By now the smell had mostly dissipated and we shrugged. Put things back together and moved on.
But that evening while cooking dinner the inverter beeped and shut down. That's weird, we're plugged in, and while we were using plenty of power it shouldn't be too much. More worrisome was that when the inverter turned back on, it wouldn't connect to pedestal power. A frantic call was made to our solar installer, and he walked me through flipping all the various switches required to troubleshoot. We narrowed it down to the automatic transfer switch, a box that toggles between generator and shore power depending on which is present. Apparently these fail, and are simple to replace... if you can get one. We did have one good power line coming in off the pedestal, even though it only powered half the RV, so we leaned on that for the night. (The generator would have worked, except the oil I put in it back in Bakersfield isn't rated for below freezing temperatures. Clearly I underestimated how much more winter was ahead of us!) We called the camp hosts and they were so kind as to lend us another space heater since we couldn't use the RV fireplace, and it was 6F outside.
We got by overnight, thankful for batteries we could lean on to power the furnace blower and lights. The next day was clear and cold, so I swept off the solar panels, since without inverter pedestal power we needed those panels to charge the batteries. There was abundant sun that day, and the morning was spent sledding and enjoying the weather. Eventually I got to climb back in the underbelly and see about that transfer switch... suffice it to say the troubleshooting was correct, it was toast. While the wiring in there is rated for a lot of current, it's not rated for a ton of heat (200F), and the switch's location in a nest of furnace ducting did us no favors. We were leaning heavily on just the one hot line, and that plus the heat must have done it in.
The good news was, since the generator side was still good, I could move our one good shore power line over to the generator side and have a safe electrical connection to the pedestal. Won’t be able to use the generator, but we couldn't use it in such cold temps anyway with the oil I have in there. On top of that, I could swap the lines coming in so the one good line would feed the inverter not the panel, thus letting us charge the batteries and run the whole RV panel off the pedestal instead of just half, thanks to how the inverter is wired. It felt amazing when it worked! We'll need the switch replaced in Alamogordo but that's fine. I'll have the new one installed in a safer location, too.
The rest of the stay was less eventful, thankfully, and mostly consisted of enjoying the snow as it slowly melted, sledding as long as it was deep enough, and enjoying the stillness of such a remote place. As I said we had the place to ourselves - just us, the hosts, and the tent camper. The campground was adorable and full of fun places to explore. In the afternoons when it was a bit warmer Luke and I liked to hole up by the fireplace in the "pavilion", an outdoor event space with a couch, lights, and faster wifi. It wasn't exactly warm, but it was nice to get out of the RV and pretty comfortable by the fire.
The park had it share of wildlife roaming through, but most frequently seen was a goose we named "Hannibal", who was a regular pest that would follow us around the park begging and sort of staring at you expectantly. Geese can be ill-tempered on a good day but to have one follow you around can be uncomfortable! We put a couple yardsticks outside to wave around and shoo him off when he got in our business.
On Thursday I went up to Cloudcroft to try to get some groceries as we were out of produce, only to find out that they don't have an actual grocery store and the closest one is in Alamogordo! I guess everyone drives all the way down the pass to get groceries? Baffling. We went to Cloudcroft again the next day to get propane, see the town, and go on a little hike. Due to the elevation Cloudcroft still had lots of snow, making for a nice little hike in the woods. We got up high enough to see White Sands! It was a beautiful afternoon in the snow and a great finish to our stay.
