3:10 to Yuma|Gilman Tunnels — Two Holes Blasted for a Logging Railroad

Two tunnels, one about a hundred feet long and the other about a hundred and twenty-five, driven straight through hard rock in the mid-1920s so the Santa Fe Northwestern Railway could haul ponderosa logs down out of the Jemez Mountains. The rails came up two decades later. The bores stayed, and a single-lane road was laid through them.

The film used this narrow gorge for its railroad work, the graded cut and the crews pushing track through country too steep to go around. Jemez Springs visitor information lists 3:10 to Yuma among the productions shot at the tunnels, alongside The Lone Ranger and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. The tunnels take their name from William H. Gilman, a railway executive who died in 1931.

You reach them by turning west off NM 4 onto NM 485, which becomes Forest Road 376, and running about five miles. Almost any passenger vehicle fits, but only one at a time, so you nose in and listen. Parking is a handful of spaces just past the north tunnel, at roughly 35.7346, -106.7644. Below the road the Rio Guadalupe runs hard and loud through the slot the locals call the Box.

Walk back through on foot. The rock is scarred where the powder holes went in, still ringed and grooved a century on, and the cold coming off it does not lift even in August with the pavement hot outside.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.