A Sad Legacy, part 2

This is the former bathroom/shower building at the abandoned state park

When I was in Harding County's largest town, Roy, I decided to drive north out of town on State Highway 120 to see if I could find what happened to the former Chicosa Lake State Park. After the highway leaves town, it travels 4 miles north and then it makes a hard, 90 degree turn and heads in an easterly direction. Finally, when I was 6 miles outside of Roy, I saw a dirt road coming in from the left. The street sign said "Chicosa Lake Road." So I turned onto this road. After about a third of mile, I started seeing covered picnic shelters, the kind that would typically be found in campsites. I made a left turn onto another dirt road and, after crossing a cattle guard, I entered the boundary of the former state park. However, I did not see any type of sign announcing that the park is now a county park or privately owned. I soon realized that I had just entered an abandoned state park! Chicosa Lake State Park is completely and utterly abandoned! This is the first time that I ever saw an abandoned state park!
I counted 20 picnic shelters. Most of them are still in good shape, but I noticed that that roof, or canopy, on 3 of them are beginning to cave in. All of these picnic shelters are lined up in a straight line next to the fence that once marked the east boundary of the state park. All road access to these former campsites is overgrown with tall prairie grasses and other types of plants, even a few thorny shrubs and prickly pear cactuses. In front of these picnic shelters is the bathroom/shower building, which looks like it is still in good condition, at least on the outside. I could not check out the inside because the bathrooms were locked. There is a big front patio on this building and towards the front center of that area I saw alot of debris piled up, such as old, rotted wood, nails and other assorted debris. The front edge of this patio is lined with wooden railing, which must have been rather attractive looking when it was maintained regularly. The parking lot next to this building is also overgrown with vegetation. I saw the entrance and exit to this parking lot. There is a wood-rail fence that runs alongside the main park road and there are 2 gaps in it, one on each end of the parking lot, where vehicles were once able to enter the parking lot. When I walked through the tall grass growing in the former parking lot, I kicked up alot of grasshoppers at every step. There was no place to park my car except in the road, although I pulled over as far to the edge of the road as I could.
Directly across the dirt road from the former bathroom building is the dried up bed of Chicosa Lake. Now it is just a dried up, cracked-mud depression in the ground, baked hard by the relentless prairie sun. The lake was de-watered by excessive pumping of the underlying water table, the western edge of the Ogallala Aquifer. This underground reservoir serves the water needs of a large area of the Midwest. The aquifer lies underneath parts of 7 states--New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. These other parts of the aquifer have also been severely depleted by groundwater pumping to irrigate the innumerable farms in this part of the United States, resulting in the drying up of many streams and lakes.
The parking lot next to the former bathroom/shower building, plus the access roads to all of the adjacent campsites, were dirt, just like the park's main road is dirt. This is typical of many New Mexico state parks that I have seen. I don't know why they keeps the roads unpaved, maybe they want it to look more natural.
When I got back to my car after checking out the bathroom/shower building and several of the picnic shelters and campsites, my shoes and socks were full of stickerburs, so I had to pick them all out.
Chicosa Lake State Park was closed in April of 1996, shortly after the lake dried up. The first time I was ever in Roy, in 1994, I remember seeing brown and white highway signs pointing the way to Chicosa Lake State Park.