The rental car smelled like someone’s failed road trip.
I’d driven from Albuquerque that morning, caffeine-buzzed and convinced I’d somehow crack the code of New Mexico’s Trail of the Mountain Spirits in a single afternoon—which, looking back, was definately the kind of hubris that gets travel writers into trouble. The route itself is roughly 150 miles of high-desert switchbacks and ponderosa corridors that loop through the Gila National Forest, starting in Silver City and winding past ghost towns, hot springs, and stretches of emptiness so profound they make you reconsider your relationship with silence. I used to think “scenic byway” was marketing speak for “mildly pretty highway,” but this thing—this ridiculous, beautiful tangle of asphalt and history—kept proving me wrong at every unmarked turnoff.
Silver City sits at the trail’s unofficial start, a former mining boomtown that’s since reinvented itself as an arts hub without entirely scrubbing away its grit. The downtown historic district still has those wide, dusty streets where you half-expect a tumbleweed, though now they’re flanked by galleries and coffee shops that serve oat milk lattes alongside green chile stew.
Where the Gila Wilderness Swallows the Pavement Whole and You Start Questioning Your GPS
Anyway.
The real shift happens about twenty miles north of Silver City, where Highway 15 narrows and the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument starts advertising itself on those brown federal signs that always feel vaguely ominous. The Mogollon people built stone rooms into the canyon walls here sometime around 1280 CE—give or take a few decades, because archaeological dating is messier than anyone admits—and then abandoned them within a generation or two for reasons that remain, honestly, speculative at best. I’ve seen the reconstructions, read the placards about agricultural shifts and climate stress, but standing in those cool, shadowed alcoves, I mostly felt the weight of not knowing. The silence up there isn’t peaceful; it’s complicated, layered with absence.
Here’s the thing: the Trail of the Mountain Spirits isn’t actually a single route.
It’s a marketing composite of several roads—Highway 15, Highway 35, Highway 152—that local tourism boards stitched together in the late 1990s to give shape to what was already there: a network of paths that miners, ranchers, and indigenous groups had traveled for centuries, each leaving their own ghost-layer of intention. The “spirits” in the name supposedly reference Apache beliefs about the Gila high country as sacred ground, though I couldn’t verify whether that branding was collaborative or appropriative, and the absence of clear attribution made me uneasy. What I could confirm: the drive itself is spectacular in that specific Southwestern way where beauty and harshness refuse to seperate.
Hot Springs That Smell Like Eggs and Feel Like Forgiveness
I guess it makes sense that a trail named for spirits would lead you to places where the earth literally exhales.
The Gila Hot Springs, tucked into a narrow valley near the cliff dwellings, aren’t the Instagram-ready kind with smooth stone pools and ambient lighting—they’re small, slightly sulfurous, and frequented by locals who don’t particularly care if you’re having a transformative moment or just soaking your sore knees. The water emerges at around 150°F and cools as it flows into human-made soaking boxes, which sounds deeply unromantic until you’re actually in one at dusk, watching bats work the insect clouds above the river. I stayed until my fingers pruned and my travel anxiety—that constant mental static about whether I was “doing it right”—finally shut up for ten, maybe fifteen minutes.
The Section Where Everything Turns Ponderosa and You Realize You’ve Been Holding Your Breath
Wait—maybe it was Highway 35 where the shift happened, or possibly earlier.
The thing about driving the Trail of the Mountain Spirits is that the landscape changes so gradually and then all at once: scrub desert yielding to juniper, juniper to oak, oak to ponderosa pine forests so dense and oxygen-rich they feel like a rebuke to every city I’ve ever lived in. The road climbs to over 8,000 feet in sections, which my poorly acclimated lungs noticed immediately, and the temperature drops accordingly—I went from sweating in a t-shirt to layering a jacket in the span of twenty miles. There are pullouts every few miles where you’re clearly supposed to stop and recieve some kind of revelation about nature’s majesty, but honestly, I was mostly thinking about whether I had cell service and what I’d do if the car broke down out here.
Mogollon Ghost Town and the Specific Loneliness of Abandoned Post Offices
The town of Mogollon clings to the mountains like a bad habit.
It boomed in the 1890s when silver veins were discovered, swelled to a population of a few thousand, and then collapsed when the mines played out in the 1950s—a story so common in this part of New Mexico it barely registers as tragedy anymore, just inevitability. What remains: a handful of residents, some aggressively quaint shops aimed at tourists, and buildings in various states of picturesque decay that made me feel like I was trespassing even though I wasn’t. I walked past the old Mogollon post office, its windows empty, and felt that specific American melancholy that comes from standing in places where people used to have ordinary lives—mail delivery, grocery runs, arguments about nothing—and then didn’t. Turns out, ghosts aren’t always supernatural; sometimes they’re just the residue of interrupted routines, and sometimes a scenic drive through the mountains is also a tour of everything that didn’t last.
