Today started in Las Vegas, the ranching town here in New Mexico, and quite cold as I left town for my first hike of the day, Sugarloaf Mountain in Harding County. Today would be a long day of mostly driving as I picked off nearly the entire set of eastern New Mexico county highpoints. I had visited the Lea County highpoint in January, and the plan was to visit the rest on this trip, when the weather is mostly nice and the snakes still asleep in their holes. Sugarloaf Peak in Harding County had gone well and actually involved some hiking. Next up were the highpoints of three counties on the Llano Estacado: Curry, Quay and Roosevelt. Other than trivial walking about, none of these three county highpoints required a lot of hiking, but did require lots of driving, and in some cases, careful map reading.

Coming down from Harding County I drove through some interesting canyon and cliff country north of Interstate-40, coming to the interstate at the town of San Jon, east of Tucumcari. Fronting the interstate on its south side were cliffs, genuine tall impressive cliffs maybe 200-300 feet high. This is the northern terminus of the gigantic Llano Estacado, a huge elevated plain covering much of southeast New Mexico and parts of Texas. The three aforementioned counties sit entirely atop this feature, which despite its interesting palisade of cliffs, is utterly flat once on top. Out of San Jon I followed NM-39 through a break in the cliffs to gain the plateau. The trick up here was to keep track of which highway I was on since they changed designations occasionally, NM-39 turning into NM-469 at one point. I passed through Wheatland, followed NM-275 east and four miles later came to the Quay-Curry county line at Curry County Road 0 (as in zero).

According to the map the county line runs down the center of this road. I went north on Road 0 for 2 miles to a section junction, where Road 0 simply ended. An east-west road picked up here, but the east road came to a gate almost immediately. This is the presumed Curry County highpoint. The land here is used for ranching and is totally flat, and nothing visually stood out here to convince me this was the highpoint; I had to trust the map. The map reports a spot elevation of 4,792 feet here at the corner, inside a 4,780-foot area extending east about another 0.7 mile. However, given the way the land slopes inexorably southeast on top the plateau, this northeast corner spot elevation seemed a pretty strong candidate for the county highpoint. For further evidence, the larger 1:100,000 map shows a single 1,460-meter contour at this corner. I felt convinced now. My time here was spent walking the area a little bit and trying to make this interesting somehow. After 10 minutes I got back into my truck and headed south, Curry County done as far as I was concerned.

From here I continued to Luciano Mesa in nearby Quay County, the third highpoint for the day, and it was not even noon yet.