Frequently Asked Questions

Your guide will go over the details for your trip when you arrange your start time. As a general guide:

• Layers. Weather in the New Mexico mountains can swing widely: a cold morning can turn into a hot afternoon, and clear skies into a sudden storm, sometimes within a few hours. Dress in layers you can add or take off, and skip the cotton — it holds water and keeps you cold when it gets wet. Synthetic and wool fabrics dry much faster.
• A rain jacket.
• Sun protection: a hat, long sleeves and sunscreen.
• Polarized sunglasses. These are critical: polarized lenses cut the glare on the water so you can see fish.
• Sturdy shoes. Hiking boots or good shoes with solid tread are recommended for walking over uneven, rocky ground. Expect them to get muddy and/or wet.
• Personal items: any medication you may need (an allergy kit, for example), bug spray, a small daypack, and a camera or phone.
• Your fishing license and habitat stamp — see Do I need a fishing license?
• Your own gear, if you have it. If you own a fly rod, reel or other fly-fishing gear, feel free to bring it. (We provide everything you need — see below.)

Waders aren’t included, and you don’t need them — we mostly fish from the bank.

Everyone in your party signs the client agreement and completes a short health and swimming form online before the trip, so there’s nothing to print or bring for that.

• Your guide, and all the fishing gear: rods, reels, lines, leaders, tippet, flies and nets.
• Ground-up instruction, on our intro trips.
• Water, on every trip.
• Lunch, snacks and beverages on full-day trips.

Not included: your New Mexico fishing license and habitat stamp (see the next question), and waders, which you don’t need.

You can see each trip’s length, group size and price on the Trips & Instruction page.

Yes. Everyone who fishes on a trip needs a current New Mexico Department of Wildlife fishing license (New Mexico requires one from age 12 up), and your guide will check licenses before the trip begins.

Habitat stamp. Every trip except our private-land trips also requires a habitat stamp for anglers 12 and older, because we fish on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land. We recommend that every angler gets one, even for private-land trips: it lets you fish public waters on your own, and it helps support conservation on our public lands.

You can buy both online, by phone at 888-248-6866, or in person at a license vendor. Licenses run from April 1 through March 31. Prices and the full rules are on the New Mexico Department of Wildlife’s website: Fishing licenses & permits (opens in a new tab).

Not sure what you need? Ask us when you book and we’ll help you sort it out.

There are plenty of options in and around the Sacramento Mountains.

Camping

• Lincoln National Forest: developed campgrounds, plus dispersed camping.
• Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.
• State parks: for example Oliver Lee Memorial State Park (opens in a new tab) near Alamogordo, at the foot of the mountains.
• Private campgrounds.

Hotels, cabins and RV parks

We’re working with some local hotels, cabins and RV parks, and we’ll share their details here soon. In the meantime, the local visitor bureaus list lodging in Cloudcroft (opens in a new tab) and Ruidoso (opens in a new tab).

Check each agency’s current rules, fees and fire restrictions before you camp.

Plenty. The mountains around Cloudcroft and Ruidoso are a popular getaway from the desert heat, and much of the area is Lincoln National Forest. Ideas for the rest of your visit:

Outdoors

• Hiking near Cloudcroft: the Osha Trail, the Rim Trail and the Mexican Canyon Trestle loop, which leads to a historic 1899 railroad trestle.
• Hiking near Ruidoso on the Lincoln National Forest, including Monjeau Lookout and the Bonito area.
• Mountain biking on the forest’s trail network.
• Horseback riding, including at Grindstone Stables, and at other stables in the area.
• Stargazing. Away from town lights, the mountains are one of the best dark-sky areas in southern New Mexico.
• Birdwatching along the mountains’ migration routes.
• Golf at public courses, including Inn of the Mountain Gods, The Lodge at Cloudcroft and The Links at Sierra Blanca.

Winter

• Skiing and snowboarding at Ski Apache and Ski Cloudcroft.
• Ziplining at Ski Apache.

History and culture

• Oliver Lee Memorial State Park (opens in a new tab) near Alamogordo, with its historic ranch house and the pools of Dog Canyon.
• Lincoln Historic Site (opens in a new tab), a preserved frontier town from the 1870s and ‘80s, and Fort Stanton Historic Site (opens in a new tab), one of the best-preserved 19th-century forts in the country.
• Smokey Bear Historical Park (opens in a new tab) in Capitan, honoring the bear cub rescued from a 1950 wildfire on the Lincoln National Forest nearby.
• Three Rivers Petroglyph Site (opens in a new tab) in the Tularosa Basin, with more than 21,000 rock carvings.
• Cloudcroft and Ruidoso themselves: shopping, restaurants and breweries.
• The casino at Inn of the Mountain Gods.

Day trips

• White Sands National Park (opens in a new tab) is an easy day trip from Alamogordo.
• Carlsbad Caverns National Park (opens in a new tab) is about 150 miles (roughly three hours) from Cloudcroft, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park (opens in a new tab) in Texas is about 35 miles farther.
• The International UFO Museum and Research Center (opens in a new tab) in Roswell is about 75 miles (roughly an hour and a half) from Ruidoso.

Before you head out, check current conditions, closures and fire restrictions with the Lincoln National Forest (opens in a new tab). For more ideas, see the visitor bureaus for Cloudcroft (opens in a new tab) and Ruidoso (opens in a new tab).

A Sky Island is a mountain range that rises out of a very different landscape, the way an island rises from the sea. Here the “sea” is the Chihuahuan Desert.

The Sacramento Mountains climb from desert floor at the edge of the Tularosa Basin, around 4,300 feet near Alamogordo, to cool forests of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and aspen. Cloudcroft sits at nearly 8,700 feet. It’s a different world from the desert below: cooler, greener and wetter, with clear mountain creeks and lakes that hold fish.

That combination — desert on every side, and trout water up in the mountains — is what we named the business for.