Mexican Canyon Trestle

Otero County · NM Highway 82 -- mile marker 16 -- Cloudcroft -- at Cloudcroft museum · location approximate

Spanning the Mexican Canyon of the Sacramento Mountains, this is the largest remaining trestle of 58 constructed for Charles B. Eddy’s Alamogordo and Sacramento Railway. Climbing 4,747 feet in 32.5 miles, the spur accessed timber for Eddy’s El Paso and Northeastern Railway. It also carried passengers in open-sided cars to Cloudcroft resorts and cabins. The line was abandoned in 1947, but immortalized in The Cloud-Climbing Railroad by Dorothy Jensen Neal. The 323-feet-long trestle is Cloudcroft’s symbol, and was restored by the U.S. Forest Service in 2010.

The Historic Preservation Division notes that its marker spreadsheet may be out of date and in places inaccurate, and that it does not know where every marker now stands. These pages carry the spreadsheet’s record; a marker listed here may have moved or may no longer stand. the program’s page ↗

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under a mile from where William Gabby lived in the 1760s

what this marker records spans 1777 to 1789, overlapping William Gabby's years here

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Marker data: Official Scenic Historic Markers program, New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, Department of Cultural AffairsMarker texts come from the Division’s published marker spreadsheet, reproduced with the Division’s written permission. Where that spreadsheet records a coordinate, the pin is the Division’s own; where it records only a highway and mile marker, an address, a junction or a named place, or where its coordinate contradicts its own highway, mile and county, the pin is ours, resolved on public road and place data and marked approximate.

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