National parks in New Mexico

New Mexico has 21 National Park Service units, and nearly all of them reward the kind of traveler who wants to actually think about where they are. You can drop into the limestone caverns at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, read centuries of traveler inscriptions carved into sandstone at El Morro, or walk through the cliff dwellings at Gila that Mogollon people cut from volcanic rock. The units spread across terrain that has almost nothing in common with itself - volcanic badlands at El Malpais, caldera grasslands at Valles Caldera in the north and west, the Salinas Pueblo Missions sitting low in the central plains, the Rio Grande corridor at Orilla Verde. Carlsbad gets the crowds. Most other units here stay quiet, which is a genuine selling point if you want solitude but not the feeling that you traded substance for it. Dark skies hold across nearly every unit on this list, so whether you're planning around stargazing or just building an itinerary that has some room to breathe, New Mexico tends to deliver.