From White Sands, US-70 heads southwest across the Tularosa Valley to LAS CRUCES - "the Crosses" - a large, modern farming community on the Rio Grande at the junction of I-10 and I-25. The town takes its name from the dozens of white crosses set up in the sands to mark the graves of early travelers killed by the Apache, but any real sense of its history is pretty well buried by motels and fast-food franchises.

The little-changed Hispanic colonial village of MESILLA , just south of I-10 two miles west, was until the 1870s one of the Southwest's largest towns, with upward of eight thousand inhabitants. During the Civil War, it even served briefly as the Confederate capital of New Mexico and Arizona, but it went into swift decline when the railroad bypassed it in favor of Las Cruces in 1881. Mesilla's delightful Old-West plaza has a real frontier feel to it, even though most of the old adobes that surround it - including the former courthouse where Billy the Kid was tried and sentenced to death in 1881 - now house art galleries and souvenir shops. Restaurants include the steak-oriented Double Eagle (tel 505/523-6700) and El Patio , a Mexican cantina (closed Sun; tel 505/524-0982), while the Mesón de Mesilla , 1803 Av de Mesilla (tel 505/525-2380 or 1-800/732-6025, $35-130), a gorgeous "boutique resort" hotel five minutes' walk east, has a top-class dining room, plus fifteen guest rooms offering widely varying facilities.