The Evolution of High Rolls: From Railroad Town to Tourist Destination
As tourism and new residents arrive, a community grapples with its future
If you have not heard of Lake Leon then you probably do not live in High Rolls, New Mexico.
The landmark is the talk of the community on a crisp morning at the general store, farm stands and on Facebook. It can cripple small cars after a good monsoon rain.
Lake Leon is a pothole. But this is no ordinary bump in the road. “When it really rained there was probably twelve to sixteen inches of water in that hole,” says Guy Ross, owner of The High Rolls General Store on Highway 82. This recurring crater symbolizes a community for some.
“They had a problem, they all worked together and got it fixed,” says Daniel Lindsay, a farm hand at Cadwallader Mountain Farms. The proverbial “lake” develops during heavy rains on Old Railroad Drive, following the historical logging trains that chugged up the mountains through High Rolls, Mountain Park, and on to Cloudcroft.
The dirt road lies out of the jurisdiction of the Otero County roads department, so the community fixes it. Funds are donated to purchase gravel, and a local dirt work company, Millhouse Septic, fills Lake Leon at no cost. “There isn't like a High Rolls city council or anything. There's no mayor. It's all just community-based,” says Ross.
About halfway up to Cloudcroft from the Tularosa Basin on Highway 82 sit the High Rolls and Mountain Park communities. It’s where the desert flora, like soaptree yuccas and prickly pear cacti, give way to evergreen and cottonwood trees. The taller peaks of the Sacramento Mountains to the east dwindle into undulating foothills that give High Rolls its name while Mountain Park is perched slightly above it.
Most people here see the two communities as one in the same. In fact, they share an address line at the post office that reads together “High Rolls Mountain Park.” Still, the area is as distinct as neighboring Cloudcroft or La Luz.
The mild climate, not quite as hot as Alamogordo during the summers or as cold as Cloudcroft winters, makes it a haven for fruit growers, retirees, and people looking to escape the city.
“Everybody understands what everybody came here to do, whether it's escape the heat, being in the mountains, or escaping a little bit. It's just nice,” says Lindsay. What the hamlet lacks for a village council comprises a Lion’s Club, a Volunteer Fire Department, a water board, and a handful of churches.
People emphasize community here. It’s a place where you can shut in to live a solitary life surrounded by nature or volunteer at the cherry or apple festivals, which host thousands of annual visitors.
Home to about 900 people, High Rolls and Mountain Park take their modern origins from the railroad. Remnants of the “Cloud-Climbing Route,” so called because of its steep traverse up the Sacramento Mountains and, often, into the clouds, still mark the land. Hikers walk the railroad bed past sun-faded trestle timbers on the popular Bridal Veil Falls Trail.
Visitors to The Old Apple Barn, the Route 66-style roadside attraction in Mountain Park, enter through doors once used to load crates of apples onto train cars. The last train ran through here in 1947 and its old track was quickly replaced by the highway, but the motivations for living and visiting High Rolls and Mountain Park have changed little since the time of the railroad.
“I think making it an unmissable destination is the goal that you have to stop,” says Hunter Niffenegger from the front porch of his family’s old business, The Old Apple Barn (the Niffeneggers recently sold the business to a family from Texas). Built in 1941 by a co-op of orchard growers in the area, the former apple processing barn is now an emporium that attracts tourists with toys, novelty gifts, homemade pies, fudge, cider, and ice cream.
The roadside attraction has been featured in magazines, newspaper articles and travel vlogs. Notably, Ozzy Osbourne and his family visited as part of Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour travel show in 2019.
Its success lies in what many businesses in the High Rolls Mountain Park area strive to do: lure the tourist dollar from vacationers passing through on their way to Cloudcroft or White Sands National Park. Niffenegger estimates The Old Apple Barn receives 50 to 60 thousand visitors annually.
“Fifty percent of the people who come to our facility are from El Paso. Approximately thirty percent are coming from Las Cruces or Alamogordo,” says Jerry Shulman. The Texas businessman and his family, including his 31-year-old triplets, now operate The Old Apple Barn and what was once “The Wild Game Bistro” next door.
There won’t be any more elk sausage at the revamped bistro (which cost the company $38 per pound), according to Shulman. But they plan to reopen the long-defunct eatery in the red-roofed log building next to the apple barn. Diners will sit there amongst a new antique emporium operated by his wife.
“We love the area with the trees and the cool summer climate. We love the 7,000-foot elevation where, during the winter, you're basically below snow level. We think the immediate area is possibly one of the nicest areas in the United States,” says Shulman.
A stone’s throw away from the apple barn lies Cadwallader Mountain Farms, one of the original orchards in the area. It’s the first day of “U-Pick” apple season, and farm hand Daniel Lindsay describes to a visiting family how to tell if a pear is ripe. “You can feel around the stem. It will get a little mushy,” he says before he expands to explain proper pear sugar content using a refractometer, a device used to measure dissolved substances in liquid.
Lindsay, age 32, is sinewy and sun-kissed with a dark stubble beard growing under a ball cap. His blue jeans and plaid blue shirt are tinted with rust-colored dirt. He looks like a farmer but performs as a ballet dancer when not working the orchards.
Vacationers emerge from rows of McIntosh and Gala apple trees, huffing and puffing as they trudge the gradual hill to get their produce weighed. They note the altitude along the way, a sure sign they come from lower elevations. They hand over galvanized buckets of freshly plucked apples, plums, pears, and peaches to Jessica Varin, another farm worker and Daniel’s wife, who tallies the haul with an old-fashioned produce scale.
Daniel and Jessica live on the property at the Cadwallader farm, now on its fifth generation as a family-run business. Daniel describes the farm’s patriarch, James Cadwallader, as his mentor.
“I'm living in a house with a 13-year-old battery bank that was upcycled, and I don't have an electric meter,” Daniel says. Much of the farm runs from solar panels that, in turn, power a pair of Chevy Volt hybrid cars and the refrigerators used to keep the produce fresh. “I haven't seen a thing that he can’t figure out. He's got a great head, a great vision.”
Inside the hulking wood barn that he and his farm hands built, James Cadwallader sits sprawled out in a dusty office rolling chair. He is tall and lanky, thoughtful when he speaks. His long-sleeve button-down shirt tucks into a pair of faded Wrangler jeans.
To be a good farmer, James says emphatically, “You gotta be nuts!” His silver belt buckle heaves with a laugh. “You don't farm for the money. You farm because you want to care for your land and resources.”
The community of Mountain Park gets its name from James’ great-grandfather, whose original farm brand was Mountain Park. His great-grandfather borrowed part of the name from “The Park,” a summer house for tourists looking to escape the heat in the early 1900s.
James’ family farmed this land through two world wars while the trains ran. They grew flowers and would load them onto box cars to arrive in Dallas the following day. Even the popular “U-Pick” strategy, where tourists visit the orchard to pick their fruit, has its roots in World War II when there weren’t enough young workers to tend the orchards, so the farmers invited people to pick for themselves. These days, a popular U-Pick weekend during peak cherry season brings more than one thousand visitors to the farm.
“Farming on the side of the mountain, that's not the easiest thing in the world…but our climate makes really excellent tasting fruit,” says James. “So our quality of taste is probably better than anywhere I've ever found, even bringing fruit from other states that are mountainous like Colorado and Utah. It's still pretty hard to beat.”
A testament to the quality of the fruit: Chef Richard Lepree at the Lodge in Cloudcroft sources fruit from Cadwallader Mountain Farms. He told Cloudcroft Reader that he purchases peaches, apples, and cherries in bulk (rather, took his kitchen team out to harvest the cherries themselves) and has plans to use them in jams and pies for the menu this winter.
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James’ cousin Mark Cadwallader has a stake in the family land next to him, where he runs Mountain Park Events, a wedding and event venue surrounded by fruit trees. James also manages a popular roadside fruit stand on Highway 82 where passers-by pick up bushels of apples, jars of honey, vegetables, and cider on their way up or down the mountain.
“I think our locals are growing faster than anything else because the mountains are getting more and more people in them. Average at the fruit stand might be fifty or sixty [people] a day,” says James.
Out in the orchard, James looks over the fruit trees from the seat of his blue Yamaha four-wheeler and points to the rolling evergreen hills beyond his land. “You can see the old house up in Haynes Canyon, and that was the only house you could see. And there was one in that open patch over there which you could see,” he says, motioning west toward the tunnel vista area. “All the rest of those are new.”
Rooftops dot the landscape now in Mountain Park and High Rolls. They are easy to spot from James’ 35 acres of farmland with its sweeping vista of the area. “I can count the number of people…families that I grew up with, on one hand,” he says. “So it’s changed a lot.”
“High Rolls has always been a place where it was high demand,” says real-estate agent Debbie Loper at Future Real Estate in Cloudcroft. She bounces between offices while discussing a nearby property over the phone. She grew up in Cloudcroft and attended school here while her family ran snow-mobile tours during the winters and did construction in the summers. She knows the area well and has worked in real estate in the mountains for ten years now.
“You have retirees that can't live at this altitude,” she says about Cloudcroft. “But they don't want Alamogordo…And you see younger couples the same way because most work in Alamogordo…They want to live in the mountains, but Cloudcroft is a little too far to commute every day, so High Rolls is a good spot, a happy median for them.”
The price of property creeps up as the elevation changes from Alamogordo to Cloudcroft, with houses becoming more expensive and the higher off the desert floor you get. Properties in High Rolls…“usually hit the market, and they’re not on the market very long,” says Loper. “I don’t think there’s the supply that meets the demand…High Rolls is kind of like Cloudcroft, you know, we're surrounded by so much national forest that there's only so much room for growth.”
Despite the scarcity of available property, High Rolls is growing. Many of its newest transplants hail from across the border in Texas, and most of them cite the same reasons for making a move: better weather, a slower pace of life, and a tight-knit community that is becoming harder to find in big cities like Houston, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
“We wanted a better place to raise our daughter, a slower pace in this environment,” says Paige Robinson. She sits with her husband, Michael Renfro, on a cat-scratched loveseat inside of the old red-brick Post Office in High Rolls. Their dog Indigo splays on his back across their laps.
“Today, we had a request for a mohawk, and that’s pretty exciting,” says Robinson. The mohawk isn’t for a punk-rock kid. Rather, it’s for a dog, a doodle, to be exact. The couple opened Mountainside Dog Grooming in the former post office last October. They bathe, clip, shave, and pamper some fifteen to twenty-five dogs a week.
Originally from Granbury, Texas, Paige and Michael, both 33, now cater to the pooches in High Rolls and Mountain Park. Their clientele is decidedly local, with a few customers making the trip from Alamogordo and Cloudcroft. “It’s more so a community than we have ever been a part of,” says Renfro.
The door chime rings, and Indigo jumps to attention as a pitbull-terrier mix named Baby leads his owner into the shop. At the end of the leash is Megan Seiler Ferguson, a tall, middle-aged woman in blue yoga pants with a ponytail that pokes out the back of a white baseball cap. “I just moved into the area,” she says excitedly. “I love having them nearby.” She nods toward Paige and Michael. Ferguson arrived from Austin, Texas where “it’s booming,” she says. “I didn’t love it. My dad lived in Cloudcroft for the past six years. I came to visit a couple of times, and I love the area.”
According to Michael and Paige their move came with strokes of luck. The competitive housing market meant the couple commuted from Paige’s mother’s home in Weed until they got wind of a rental from a client. “We looked for a little while, and it ended up like this building, just falling into our lap. We got lucky,” says Robinson. They rent a three-bed, two-bath house on three acres for less than $2,000 a month.
Their clientele skews mostly older, too. While demographics are hard to pin down for High Rolls itself, as it’s not classified as a village or town, the sense is the population leans toward middle-aged and up.
James Cadwallader echoes this sentiment. He recalls his childhood at the stone schoolhouse, where he learned alongside some sixty kids. The High Rolls Mountain Park School taught grades one through six then. Now, the same elementary school teaches Kindergarten to fifth grade and enrollment is about half what it was when James attended fifty-five years ago. Volunteer numbers at the fire department have trended downward, too.
“We have a really high number of retirees up here on the mountain,” says Kurt Kochendarfer, Assistant Fire Chief at the High Rolls Volunteer Fire Department. “It’s beautiful, the weather’s great, you don’t shovel a lot of snow…but retirees aren’t necessarily interested in coming out to the volunteer departments, putting out fires and running into burning buildings.”
Back at Mountainside Grooming, Paige and Michael express some difficulty in meeting couples their age. “When I was working at Allsup’s, there would be people come in, and I’d feel like, man, I could be friends with them,” says Renfro. He did a stint at the store in Cloudcroft for a few weeks to cover the up-front cost of their rental house. Still, he says, “it’s an ideal place to raise a kid.” Paige chimes in, “I feel like she’s going to have a pretty magical childhood.”
Their two-year-old daughter stays with them at the shop most days. “School is just up the road and the fruit trees. She loves cherry picking, and we pick elderberries. She likes to find mushrooms,” says Robinson. “We want to primarily serve this community and keep it personable. That’s a big part of why we moved here.”
The one-hundred-year-old schoolhouse in Karr Canyon belongs to the Alamogordo school district. Children who age out are bussed “down the hill” to attend middle and high school, though some opt to attend Cloudcroft schools or home school. “Once in a while, they try to shut it down, every four or five years,” says James. “We’ve been able to keep it open, which is good.”
Across the street and catty corner from the groomers Guy Ross stands behind a long counter inside his general store and wraps breakfast burritos in foil. He holds the title of mayor unofficially in a community that doesn’t have such a position. Whether in front of his store or out on the street, he waves to passers-by on the highway, seemingly recognizing everyone.
“I’m a community person, so I’m here to help,” says Ross. The raspy squawk of an emergency radio resonates through the store. He captains the High Rolls Volunteer Fire Department and wears its logo on a hat with red flames on the brim.
Ross, 65, moved to the area twenty years ago. A construction job lured him to The Camp of The Tall Pines near Weed, where he helped replace outhouses with modern bathrooms. Since then, he ran a T-shirt shop in Cloudcroft, maintained rental cabins, acted as Fire Chief, and now runs the general store. His burritos cost $5.50, “and they’re not greasy,” he says. “My goal is to keep the girls employed and convenience for the locals…It’s a tough job…It’s a mom-and-pop shop, basically.”
Behind the register, next to a wooden shelf with an assortment of medicines and chewing tobacco, sits Kris Kochendarfer. She is 21, the daughter of Kurt and has worked at the general store since the age of 17. She grew up in High Rolls and runs the store when Guy is out feeding his chickens.
“I would love to see High Rolls turn into something closer to a Cloudcroft, where it’s more of a village. The businesses can be more community-based and work together,” says Kris. “Before, I remember people only ever came here to visit family. They’re like, ‘my grandma lives here that’s why I’m in town.’” But that’s changed, says Kris, “definitely turned into a tourist town.”
Much like Cloudcroft, interest in High Rolls Mountain Park accelerated during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. A new onslaught of remote workers and big city defectors set out for greener pastures. Like the railroad passengers before them, they found the picture-book scenery of the mountains, the climate, and people worthy of a vacation or home.
More than a dozen Airbnbs are sprinkled around the hillsides, with more likely to come. Anything from glamping tents to swanky log cabins with hot tubs can be had with a few clicks. A support line to report loud Airbnb guests made the rounds on the community Facebook page.
Still, businesses like The Old Apple Barn and Cadwallader Mountain Farms grow by giving visitors a look into the past. Theirs’ is a history to be celebrated as the community walks a tightrope between preserving bucolic beginnings and undoubted change into the modern era. “One of our state senators used to say, ‘if you're not growing, you're dying’” says James Cadwallader. The question remains: how much can High Rolls Mountain Park grow when surrounded by a national forest?
“I hate to say it, but I don’t think there will be any major fruit raising here in fifty years,” says James. “The price of land in these mountains is astronomical. Then it becomes almost impossible for a farmer to purchase and pay for a piece of land from what they make.”
James meanders through his fruit trees and plucks peaches and plums from the branches. He bites into them to test their taste. “It would be nice to keep a few farms up here. There are days when I doubt it will happen, but it’s a good thought,” he says.
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Well-written and informative article! You definitely captured the wonderful nuances of HIgh Rolls ❣️
Thank you for this informative article on an area I really enjoy.