Bottomless Lakes offers cool water, family camping and year-round trails

With at least eight sinkholes and a playa, the waters of Bottomless Lakes State Park are welcome when it’s 98 degrees in March. 

The park, just east of Roswell, became the first state park in New Mexico in 1933. In a state where water is king, the state park designation makes sense. It offers camping, day-use, swimming, fishing, mountain biking and birdwatching.

The cenote-like water sources, similar to Santa Rosa’s iconic Blue Hole, glisten in blues and greens. There’s a cliff face along the park with a trail atop it. Up close you can see the water in each sinkhole is deep, not bottomless.

Swimming is only allowed at Lea Lake and it has a swimming beach, a shade stone structure and bathrooms. Nonmotorized boats are allowed. Lea Lake’s campgrounds have electrical hookups and drinking water, while the closest spots next to the water are for tents only. Campsites at Lea Lake require reservations.

The Lower Lakes area offers 10 campsites with a vault toilet and a great view. 

Access to most New Mexico State Parks is free for New Mexico residents until May 1. The bathrooms with running water and showers were very clean even with the nearly-full campground, full of children splashing in and out of the only water on this March day.

The first thing we wanted to do when we got to the park was to make use of the electricity and get our overhead AC going.

The sun went down around 7:30 p.m., foreshadowing a cooler starlit evening. A toe bath proved the water was refreshingly nippy.

The visitor center is walking distance to the most breathtaking sinkholes. Each lake or sink seem to have its own characteristics, including depths ranging from 17 to 90 feet. Two of the most beautiful sinks — Cottonwood Lake and Mirror Lake — are within 100 feet of the center parking lot.  The nearby red cliffs, which are made mostly of gypsum, give the water its color through erosion, according to a video from the Sandia Mountain Natural History Center. 

Before the sun rose over the cliffs, the sinkhole trail lured us to the water’s edge. Warning signs about cougar country were posted along the path. Suddenly in the sand, we spotted cat tracks and whipped out our camera and iPhones to memorialize them. These looked very similar to the paw prints on the signs.

Although you can’t jump in most of the lakes, fishing is allowed in Devil’s Inkwell Lake and Pasture Lake, which are stocked between March and November. Two fishermen were after trout that morning, and they had caught one before 8 a.m. Luckily, they had a New Mexico fishing license because park rangers were patrolling.

We swapped vanlife stickers and stories with adventurers from Virginia, who had camped in one of the primitive campsites within feet of a sinkhole. They told a tale of being woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of rustling. A raccoon had found a trash bin and scavenged through it, scattering bits of rubbish across the state park area, they said. Being good stewards of the land, they picked up the mess left by the marauding racoon.

With 130 bird species, some that stay year-round, the park offers birdwatching blinds along a nature trail. Although it wasn’t prime birding season in late March, the Lazy Lagoon — the playa with wetlands on the north of the park — had birds looking for morning breakfast.

The north entrance to the park features a mountain bike trail that starts before the road dips down beneath the cliffs to the water features.

What else can you say about this park? It’s less than a four-hour drive from Albuquerque. Come in the winter for hiking.

If you’re going to spend the day in warmer weather, take advantage of the most precious resource — water.

Donn Friedman is a roving columnist for The Sunday Journal’s GO New Mexico outside section. He is the retired asst. managing editor for technology and production for the Albuquerque Journal.