I can’t remember being more pleasantly surprised by a park than I was by Blue Water Lake State Park. I expected a nice lake for sure, but from the pictures online I expected lots of sun, no trees, and lots of sand. Basically a lake with desert shrubs and campsites. Which is fine. We do live in New Mexico after all. But it can get awful hot in the endless sun.
The reality is that Blue Water Lake is your regular average high desert lake that used to be a river. Nice start. But, the real treat was the canyon, located just on the other side of the campground from the lake. There’s a moderately strenuous path down into the canyon and then an easy footpath along a creek and back up to the campground. A trail spoke heads off and continues about another mile down to the base of the dam. We didn’t realize we’d left the loop and were in this spoke and we made it down to this idyllic meadow in the shadow of the concrete wall.
This water though! So so lush.
Some parts of the path were just matted down grass. I mean, you just never walk through grass like this in New Mexico.
The campground is quite large and also pretty much vacant while we were there. This view is right from our site. Nice, am I right?
Pretty cute kids too.
It was a little bit of a walk downhill to the water, but as it was windy we didn’t get much fishing in anyway.
Just down from our site was a short walk to a lookout over the dam.
We’ll definitely be going back!
The Arnold Experience 