Camp Rio

In the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico at 6,700 feet—in Otero County where the Lincoln National Forest's ponderosa pine and Apache plume canyon landscape creates the wildlife corridors, racing streams, and cool mountain-air environment that makes the Sacramento high country one of New Mexico's most rewarding and least discovered outdoor destinations—Camp Rio at 2180 Rio Penasco Road in Mayhill offers full hookup RV sites with 30 and 50-amp service, tent camping, vintage-vehicle glamping (a Shasta trailer, school buses, a Chris Craft boat, a gypsy wagon), three cabins, laundry, baths, showers, WiFi, and a rentable pavilion on a clean family property surrounded by thousands of acres of national forest where the small valleys, mountain glens, birds, and wildlife of the Rio Peñasco watershed create the setting that the day trips to Ruidoso, White Sands, and Billy the Kid country reward from a genuinely remarkable mountain base camp. The elevation delivers cool nights. The forest delivers everything else. Full hookup sites with 30 and 50-amp electric, water, and sewer serve the RV guest, while the tent sites, the three named cabins, and the one-of-a-kind vintage glamping fleet—the Shasta trailer, the converted school buses, the Chris Craft boat on land, the gypsy wagon—provide the range of alternative accommodations that a creative campground in the middle of Lincoln National Forest's canyon country assembles over years of inventive development. Clean baths and showers, laundry, upgraded free WiFi, and the rentable pavilion for group gatherings complete the practical infrastructure. The property's position surrounded by the national forest means the wildlife viewing, the bird watching in the mountain glens, and the sound of the Rio Peñasco in the canyon bottom are immediate rather than a short drive away. Mayhill sits in the Sacramento Mountains on NM-82 between Artesia and Cloudcroft, in the forested highlands where the Mescalero Apache's traditional mountain territory and the Lincoln National Forest's 1.1 million acres create the protected landscape that preserves the elk, black bear, mule deer, and the raptor diversity that the Sacramento high country sustains. The National Solar Observatory at Sunspot, 20 miles south on the Sacramento Peak, provides the one-of-a-kind tour of the sun-watching facility whose 60-foot vacuum tower telescope has observed solar activity since 1952 in the clear-sky position the Sacramento Mountains provide. Ruidoso, 25 miles east via US-70, anchors the regional tourism infrastructure with Ruidoso Downs Racing's quarter horse meets, the Ski Apache resort on Sierra Blanca Peak (elevation 11,500 feet), the Hubbard Museum of the American West, and the Lincoln Historic District 40 miles east on US-380—the restored adobe structures of the town where the Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid's escape from the courthouse in 1881 created the most documented episode of frontier New Mexico history. White Sands National Park, 90 miles south, protects the world's largest gypsum dune field in the Tularosa Basin's extraordinary white landscape. Camp Rio operates year-round in the Sacramento Mountains' high-elevation climate, where the summer temperatures averaging 20 degrees cooler than the lowland Chihuahuan Desert below create the relief that makes the 6,700-foot Mayhill position genuinely comfortable from June through September when the lowland campgrounds of southern New Mexico are enduring their most intense heat. The fall elk rut in September and October, the winter snow that occasionally closes NM-82, and the spring wildflower bloom in the mountain meadows define the seasonal rhythms that the campground's surrounding national forest delivers in rotation. Reserve your site, cabin, or vintage glamping unit at Camp Rio and let the Sacramento Mountains' forest, wildlife, and canyon streams prove that the high road to Ruidoso is worth every mile.