Hidalgo County gets $147,741 for seven-mile Playas trail project

Hidalgo County will get $147,741 to help build a seven-mile public trail project in Playas, a move that is meant to add interpretive signage and connect the area to the Continental Divide Trail and the Playas Peak trail network. The grant gives one of New Mexico’s most remote counties a visible outdoor investment with a practical payoff: clearer access, a better visitor experience, and a stronger draw for hikers passing through Lordsburg and the Bootheel.

The county award was part of a larger Trails+ funding round announced April 6 by the Outdoor Recreation Division of the New Mexico Economic Development Department. Statewide, nearly $6 million went to projects in 21 counties to build and improve more than 355 miles of trails and support an estimated 288 jobs. The department said it was the largest single round awarded to date. Since Trails+ began in 2020, the program has awarded $39.8 million to 282 projects across 29 counties and supported an estimated 2,650 jobs.

For Hidalgo County, the money lands in Playas, where the trail work carries more than a recreation angle. New Mexico Tech says Playas was once a company town of about 1,500 people tied to a Phelps Dodge copper smelter. After the smelter and town closed in 1999, New Mexico Tech later bought the site for $5 million and turned it into the Playas Research and Training Center. That history makes the signage piece especially important, because the project is meant to interpret a landscape that has shifted from industrial town to research site to outdoor destination.

The tourism case is unusually strong for a county this far from New Mexico’s population centers. The Continental Divide Trail Coalition says Hidalgo County hosts the southernmost trailhead for the Continental Divide Trail and includes 82 of the trail’s most rustic miles. The county has also been designated a Continental Divide Trail Gateway Community. Tying Playas more directly to that trail system could help turn trail traffic into spending on fuel, food and lodging in and around Lordsburg.

The project also brings students into the work. Animas High School interns are included in the design and construction of the signage, adding a youth training element to a public works grant. That fits the kind of hands-on interpretation the National Park Service says wayside signs are meant to provide, offering orientation, safety and site significance at key points along a trail. In this case, the state is not just funding a path. It is helping Hidalgo County make Playas easier to read, easier to reach and more valuable to the local economy.