New Mexico Facts

Ted Turner owns about 1.4% of New Mexico, making him the state's largest private landowner with over 1.1 million acres across three reserves.

There's a restaurant in Albuquerque called Tim's Place that serves breakfast, lunch, and hugs - and it's owned by a man with Down's Syndrome.

There is a city in New Mexico called Truth or Consequences.

Every October, hundreds of hot air balloons fill the sky above Albuquerque, often called the most photographed event on Earth. It began with 13 balloons in a mall parking lot in 1972, a stunt for a radio station's 50th birthday. A storm kept most of the other pilots on the ground. 20,000 people still came to watch. Today over 500 balloons fill that sky. The parking lot is long gone. The sky is still full.

Smokey Bear was a poster before he was a real bear. In 1950, firefighters in New Mexico found a three-month-old black bear cub clinging to a burned tree, his paws scorched from a wildfire. They nursed him back to health, named him Smokey, and sent him to the National Zoo in Washington DC. He lived there for 26 years. He got so much fan mail he was given his own ZIP code: 20252. He is buried in Capitan, New Mexico.

In 1898, a teenage ranch hand named Jim White rode the New Mexico desert at dusk and saw smoke boiling out of the ground. There was no fire, just bats pouring from a hole. He built a wire ladder and climbed down. That hole is now Carlsbad Caverns' Natural Entrance. Every evening from April through October, a ranger still seats visitors on stone benches there. Several hundred thousand bats spiral out at sunset.