Final part of our Carlsbad trip.

We continued our trip to Brantley Lake State Park and Bottomless Lakes State Park with an eye to scouting out future camping sites. There was also a side trip to Capitan.  That was the birth place of my mother, and was known at that time as El Capitan at the time of her birth.

This is a picture of the dam taken from the driveway of the park.

Brantly has a nice play ground for the children.

These are a few of the campsites in the first-come-first serve sites. There are several that are easily accessible, and could be backed into without too much trouble.

We will definitely keep this park on our list of possible campsites. It offers a good kayaking experience also.

This is an overview of Lea Lake and the campground at Bottomless Lakes State Park.  It is one of many of the lakes.  They were formed by the collaspe of the caverns etched out below the ground.

There are several lakes and some primitive camping available, but this was the only one we saw that had improved camping available.

Here is a view of some of the reservation sites available.

There plenty of non-reserve sites that have easy access.  The campground was sparsely populated, but we were getting into some pretty cool weather at this time.

I did not take pictures of Capitan, except for this picture of the display sign of the Smokey Bear Museum.  

Here is another photo of the museum with out pickup parked in front.  It is typical for us to formulate images of places we have heard about, and Capitan was no exception.  I imagined it would be a larger and more densely populated town.  It is a small village with its current claim to fame being the birth place of the real Smokey Bear.  It is also the burial place of Smokey.

My mother was born there in 1919.  New Mexico became a state in 1912, but had been a territory of the United States since 1859, so even if she had been born in 1912 or earlier she still would have been a U.S. citizen.