Bloody Valverde recreation Wild Rivers recreation area

Wild Rivers recreation area

and additional text material and maps on the geology of New Mexico

This is the hottest and driest region in Washington with an average of just 8 to 14 inches of rain a year

Revised 2017

picnic sites

Bloody Valverde recreation Wild Rivers recreation areaWhen Jefferson Davis commissioned Henry H. Sibley a brigadier general in the Confederate army in the summer of 1861, he gave him a daring mission: to capture the gold fields of Colorado and California for the South. Their grand scheme, premised on crushing the Union forces in New Mexico and then moving unimpeded north and west, began to unravel along the sandy banks of the Rio Grande late in the winter of 1862. At Valverde ford, in a day long battle