Originally Posted by Reverend Sam

First, DO THE LONG TRIP! GO TO MONUMENT VALLEY!!! In fact, monument valley is only a couple of hours from Arches National Park. GO TO ARCHES! It's awesome! That's where they filmed all of the Roadrunner cartoons. It's kinda like monument valley compressed into a much smaller space.

Now, about the tires, I grew up in New Mexico. If you're going to do the long trip, you definitely need the all season tires. Northern New Mexico gets a lot of snow. And it gets really cold there at night. Temps in the single digits are not uncommon in most of New Mexico during the winter. The rubber on summer tires gets very hard in cold weather, and the hard rubber causes poor traction, even if the road is dry. I got a set of Continental ExtremeContact DWS tires about a year ago. They are great. They have great reviews on Tirerack.com. On dry pavement with traction control turned off I have trouble breaking traction from a standing start. They are that sticky. But they are also all season tires, and they are supposed to be good in the snow, too. The tread design has the letters D, W, and S recessed into it. They show the tire wear and illustrate when the tires are no longer good for different conditions. In other words, when the S disappears, you should no longer drive in snow. When the W disappears they are no longer good for wet conditions, and when the D disappears you need new tires.

Also... if you want a really awesome, desolate, high-desert drive with lots of wildlife, after leaving Alamogordo drive up to Socorro and take US 60 from Socorro to Show Low, Arizona. Make sure you fill up in Socorro, because there's only 1 gas station for about 200 miles, and it might not be open.

I did that drive last summer and I was just in awe the whole way. We saw a couple of herds of elk, lots of deer, a couple of coyotes, roadrunners... There's mountains all around but you're driving on a high plateau about 7000 feet in elevation. We only saw a handful of cars the whole way from Socorro to Show Low. In December I'd guess there's a good likelihood of snow being on the surrounding mountains, and maybe even on the desert down at road-level.