Cuervo Mountain RV Park wins a national award for medium-sized campgrounds
By Melody Groves
Sparrows and mourning doves call to each other. A slight breeze brings a scent of pine to the morning air. Startled grasshoppers leap out of the way of footfalls. Shoulders back, standing in the middle of his award-winning and eco-friendly Cuervo Mountain RV Park and Horse Hotel just north of Moriarty, owner Rick Anaya points to a mesa, standing tall and proud in the east.
“That’s Cuervo Mountain,” he says. “My dad’s family ranches there.”
Turning north, he points to the Ella Dora Road sign that leads to his RV campground.
“Ella Dora was my grandmother, ” he says. “ My mother’s mother. She was so excited to have a road named after her.”
When it was named less than a decade ago, the road was a dirt trail leading to what would become the RV campground headquarters and Rick’s personal residence. Ella Dora pointed to her namesake each time she rode past.
Five years later—in 2022—Rick was excited to win the “Plan-It Green Friendly Award” for medium-sized campgrounds by the Association of Recreational Vehicle and Campgrounds.
“Very proud of it,” Rick says. “It’s a national award.”
The association’s annual competition evaluates parks that embrace recycling and renewable energy.
Cuervo Mountain RV Park is 3 miles north of Moriarty, 35 miles east of Albuquerque. The award-winning RV park also provides a horse hotel where horses can stay the night.
Rick’s family has lived in New Mexico for 400 years and still owns a couple of ranches in the area. The oldest of six siblings, Rick grew up in Galisteo (just up NM Hwy 41 from Moriarty) and attended school in Santa Fe. In 1980, he graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the University of New Mexico.
“I grew up building things and doing construction,” he says.
After college, he spent the next couple of decades working and living all over the world, including 20 years in South America where he learned to speak Spanish and Portuguese.
Missing family and New Mexico, he returned to the state a few years ago and went looking for a business opportunity. Wanting to build something, he found an old hotel for sale in Moriarty and made plans to recondition it. However, just before the purchase was finalized, Rick’s good friend and former Moriarty Chamber of Commerce Chair Debbie Ortiz suggested the need for a nice RV campground off Interstate 40. The bug bit.
He found the appropriate property, spent three years doing paperwork and construction, then officially opened in September 2018.
Today, Cuervo Mountain RV Park offers 54 pull-through sites, each large enough for any size RV with towed boats or trucks. Rick has added water, power and sewer hookups, picnic tables with trees, propane availability, Wi-Fi, a playground area, four 10-by-10-foot tack rooms with locking doors, a tool shed, a dog park for small animals next to the tree farm, and trash dumps. A clubhouse also has laundry facilities and showers. The park provides perimeter lighting, carefully placed so unwanted light doesn’t flood the campsites at night and interfere with sleep.
Rick provides both long- and short-term RV storage for locals and visitors. With short drives to Santa Rosa Lake and Cochiti Lake, he sees a lot of boats come through the park.
The 11.5-acre park features four Airbnb units that are furnished with everything to make a stay complete. Additionally, there are two fully furnished cabins, with a third in the works. Always thinking of the environment, Rick installed 600 solar panels at the park that provide 35,000 kilowatt-hours.
Since opening in September 2018, Rick has planted more than 150 indigenous trees on-site—mostly juniper and pine—and installed a 10,000-gallon rainwater harvesting storage system in order to conserve and protect natural resources. All the trees are watered by drip irrigation. He also has a 300,000-gallon system for fire protection hookup by the local fire department.
“I’m an engineer, and I can build,” Rick says.
He’s never finished working on his campground. He plans to have horseshoe competitions next year at his three horseshoe pits. A barbecue pit complete with pizza oven is finished. He also wants to pave Ella Dora Road to cut down on dust.
A majority of the campground tenants are subcontractors,
including some who install wind turbines for the nearby wind farms and others who help establish high-voltage power lines in the area. To date, there are 900 windmills in four New Mexico counties, and the power generated in central New Mexico is sent to Arizona and California.
In his spare time, Rick serves on the board of directors of the Central New Mexico Electric Co-op, the largest in New Mexico with roughly 4,500 miles of line and 14,000 members.
Proud of his Plan-It Green Friendly Award, Rick is considering entering the competition again this year.
“Depends on the paperwork,” he says, smiling.