Sante Fe

Staircase at Chapel of Loretto

Today was our last tourist day of this trip. We visited the New Mexico History in the Palace of Governors. The museum would have been a disappointment if it we hadn’t joined the museum tour. The guide told a lot of stories around the various museum exhibits making it much more interesting. We also visited the suspended rotary stairs in the Chapel of Loretto – a unique design which has no central support. The church itself is based off of St. Chapel in Paris. Our last stop was St. Miguel Church, the oldest church in America, built by Indians in the 16th century.

So what were the highlights of this trip? Mary and I both agreed: the Panhandle-Plains museum in Canyon, TX, Big Bend National Park, especially the bird watching, and the scenery around the river, McDonald observatory’s star party, Carlsbad Cavern, and White Sands National Monument.

Albuquerque

Albuquerque Museum of Natural History

We had a quiet day in the Old Town portion of Albuquerque today. Our primary visit was the Museum of Natural History. The museum is based on a tour through time beginning with the big bang into modern times. The majority of the museum is focused on dinosaurs, largely because New Mexico is a premier site for paleontologists. They feature many of the dinosaurs only found in New Mexico. Other highlights include a section on volcanoes and another on the various caves found in the state. The Old Town portion had actually improved significantly since our visit many years ago. More tourist businesses surrounded the main square.

Balloon Museum, Albuquerque

This morning we went from Las Cruces to Albuquerque. Our tourist stop was the International Balloon Museum. The museum was pretty good: a mixture of balloon history, interactive exhibits (landing a balloon, tying knots) and artifacts – particularly the cabins for the first transatlantic and transpacific balloon flights. The transatlantic capsule was particularly interesting: it was like a dual hulled boat, with a yellow top to be seen at sea, and a red bottom, designed to be flipped over to provide a shelter if they land on land or ice. Another interesting factor was the exhibits on how balloons and airships were used in wars from the 1800’s until World War II. They were used for observation, for dropping bombs, or for launching planes (suspended from cables in WWI). We also discovered one of the primary reasons Albuquerque is home for the balloon festival each year, it’s wind patterns. Typically, you can go along one mountain range to head north, and then return along the other mountain range and return back to your starting point.

White Sands

On the Dune Trail in White Sands

We started the day by visiting White Sands National Monument. The visitor center was a beautiful adobe building with a introductory film that described how this was an unique place on earth – dunes made of white gypsum sand. Gypsum easily dissolves in water from the mountains above and settles in low spots called playa. From here the water evaporates leaving the gypsum. The wind carries it forming dunes which can move up to 30 feet per year. Most sand is made of quartz, not gypsum, which is why this is unique. In turn, that creates unique creatures, variations of lizards and rodents that are white in color to help disguise them from predators. We enjoyed our hikes through the dunes. Particularly amazing were the soap yucca, which grow fast enough to keep their leaves above the sand (reaching 40 feet in height) only to die when the dune moves past them. Similarly there are quite a few Rio Grand cottonwoods growing in the dunes. How do these water thirsty trees live here? Well there root system goes down to the clay layer where the water flow beneath the sand. As long as they can keep some leaves above the sand, they can flourish. Most of the plants and animals live in the interdunal areas between the dunes. But where the dunes are really moving quickly almost no plant life exists.
From there we headed to the White Sands Missile Base Museum. Here they test many of the armed forces missiles starting in the 1940’s till the present day. Most interesting was the video on the Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was tested. An interesting sidelight was that they used a dynamite explosion beforehand to test all the tracking instruments, before the actual explosion. Since most of the observers were only 10 miles from the site, I hate to think how much radiation they were exposed to. Outdoors they had a sampling of many of the rockets and missiles tested there from a 1940 rocket to some of the Patriot anti-missile rockets. Most interesting was one of the contraptions that looked like a flying saucer – a method to slow the descent of a weather missile. I wonder how many people reported UFOs from that contraption.

Alamagordo

V-2 Wreckage, Space History Museum

We headed off into the flat desert today, mostly grass with some cactus and then as we headed west we entered Lincoln National Forest and rolling hills. At the top where was this spectacular sight: a gap in the hills revealed the white sands below, looking very barren and sun-baked. We visited the New Mexico Space History Museum today. I was disappointed compared to other space museums. They described a lot about the rockets and engines used, a little about the satellites and manned space crafts, but not nearly as well presented as the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida. The highlight was the Top 10 achievements of the Hubble telescope which had both beautiful photos and interesting science. The film about the recently won X Prize ($10M) for the first commercial spacecraft was also interesting.

Carlsbad Caverns

The Big Room Carlsbad Cavern

The humidity is only about 3% and the temperature is in the 80’s, so the Carlsbad Cavern felt pretty good today. We took the tour of the Big Room – and yes, it is big – the trail around the room is 1 ¼ miles and takes about an hour and half to walk. This cave is different than most we have been in – because it was carved out by sulfuric acid rather than water. The cavern is still part of the gigantic limestone reef that is nearby in the Guadalupe Mountains. The formations were quite varied: stalagmites, stalactites, columns, draperies, and popcorn. Most of the cave is quite dry – since the land above is primarily desert, but it is obvious that at one time, there must have been quite a lot of water that seeped through and formed this cave. An interesting historical fact, Jim White, a 16 year old cowboy, discovered the cave and tried to get people interested in preserving it. He created some of the pathways through the cave in the 1930s. Eventually, this was declared a National Monument and Jim became the head ranger here. In the afternoon, I took the guided tour through the King’s Palace. Not quite as spectacular as the Big Room, we also went through a number of chambers with water features and some curly style rock formations that sort of squeezed out under high pressure like toothpaste and then hardened. The day finished with a road tour of some of the canyons on the surface. We would highly recommend a visit to Carlsbad Caverns.

Guadalupe Mountains

Frijole Ranch, Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Today our primary touristy thingy was to visit Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Our trip to the Panhandle and Plains Museum proved to be a good introduction to this park. The Guadalupe Mountains are a limestone formation which used to be a reef built up with algae and other small crustaceans. This was at the edge of a vast sea that engulfed most of Western Texas. We took a couple of short hikes here – the first explained the geology and vegetation of this area. This is also the site of the Pinery Stagecoach Station – one of the stations positioned every 20 miles on the Butterfield Overland mail route between St. Louis and San Francisco. The stages would cover this 2100 mile route in 25 days, delivering the mail (before the Pony Express). Our second site was the Frijole Ranch, which at one time had a orchard with quite a few varieties of fruit – apples, cherries, etc. Here there is a natural spring and some protection from the winds, since the mountains rise nearby.

Fort Davis and McDonald Observatory

McDonald Observatory

The wind blew most of the night, cooling things off, but also making it hard to sleep. In the morning, as the sun rose, the winds calmed down. We packed up our trailer and headed west to Terlingua, which now is a ghost town, but was the major source of the mineral mercury in the U.S. (very important during World War II). Today it is best known for its International Chili cook-off. From there we headed through Big Bend Ranch State Park – here the terrain changed again to a grassy desert terrain with the Rio Grand running through. The road is a great road for motor bikes, but it presented some challenges for us, especially the 15% grade we climbed at one point on the road. We then headed to Fort Davis, a U.S. fort from about 1854 through 1891, primarily to protect the road from San Antonio to El Paso, Texas. They’ve done a good job of restoring many of the building here, especially some of the barracks and officer’s quarters. They are in the midst of restoring the hospital. We camped a short distance away at Davis Mountain State Park – a tiny state park, which mostly is a very nice campground. The highlight of the day was going to the “star party” at the McDonald Observatory (sponsor of NPR’s Stardate program). They pointed out all the primary constellations in the sky with a laser pointer and then we got a chance to observe the sky through a series of telescopes. We observed the 7 sisters in Pleiades, the M-3 Star cluster, the craters of the moon (it was almost a full moon) and the hit – Saturn with 4 of its moons.

Big Bend Santa Elena Canyon

Santa Elena Canyon at the end of the trail

Another hot day, the high was near 100. Today we started with a tour of what used to be a small inn around a hot springs, right off the Rio Grand river. We then headed for the Ross Maxwell scenic drive and the old town of Castolon, which is now a visitor center. This was a remote farming and ranch area for many years – it certainly looked like a meager existence. The highlight of the day was Santa Elena Canyon, which is an 8 mile long canyon with 1500 foot walls, through which the Rio Grand emerges. We took what was supposed to be an easy hike (about 1.6 miles round trip) into the canyon. Surprise- this hike was mostly up and down which was difficult in all this heat. The start was up a paved set of steps and slopes for several hundred feet – we saw a lot of people give up after a few of the switchbacks. We did make it, but this was almost too much for Mary after her knee surgery 2 weeks ago. We were rewarded with a beautiful view of the canyon from a shady and sandy shore. A number of folks canoed through the river as we were watching (we envied there easier trip down the river). This evening, I went on the nature trail to get a sunset view of the both the Chisos mountains and the Sierra Madres on the Mexican side.

Sunrise view of the Rio Grand River with the Chisos Mountains

Big Bend Birding

The Rio Grand River near our campsite

Our campsite has a lot of trees and birds. There is quite a lot of racket The park has over 450 species of birds that either live here or migrate through the park, the most of any National Park. So we started the day appropriately with a ranger guide birding. For a beginner, I found it quite interesting how one approaches identifying a bird. Start with the size and shape of the bird, and then observe the shape of the beak – this will generally get you to the right high level classification. Now you need to pay attention to the patterns on the head, wings, throat, breast, and tail. The shape of the wings, and tail can also be a good clue, especially if all you can see is the silhouette of the bird. With the help of a field guide, we identified the white winged dove (very common), turkey vultures, common raven, mockingbird, and a number of woodpeckers and song birds. An interesting and hot morning, the temperature was already about 98 degrees by 11:30.
In the afternoon, we headed for Chisos basin. While most of the park is desert, here is an island of mountain peaks. Thus many species like mountain lions and black bear are only found here. We had a gorgeous view through the windows from the basin, where you see the desert to the Northwest. Then we took a hike up the Lost Mine Trail, which gives you a view of Lost Mine Mountain. Temperatures were about 10 degrees cooler than down below. The evening finished with a program on Raptors.

Midland to Big Bend National Park

Seirra Madres at Sunset

The temperatures really changed today. Two nights ago we were below freezing and today we were in the high 90’s. Similarly the terrain changed again – much more desert like with cactus and dry grasses. At the same time, we went from the endless plains to seeing buttes and as we approached the park, mountains. The mesquite trees here are in full green versus this morning where they were almost bare. We took an evening trip to Boquillas Canyon along the Rio Grande with spectacular cliffs on the Mexican side of the river and this small river running through the canyon.

Amarillo to Midland, Texas

Early Drill Rig with Steam Engine

The land around Amarillo was a surprise to me: very agricultural. There are grain elevators everywhere and lots of irrigation from the Ogallala aquifer. It’s the wrong time of the year to see exactly what grain they are growing, probably corn, perhaps wheat. As we head south the crop changed to cotton. The stems are bare now, but some remaining cotton balls are stuck on the branches. Finally, as we approached Midland, the land changed again – to Mesquite trees and oil wells.
Our major stop for the day was the Petroleum museum. Here they give you the full story of how they drill for oil: using instruments to map the underground formations, exploratory wells where it looks promising (less than 5% find enough oil for production; production wells and the techniques to get the oil out of the ground, and finally the maintenance process and secondary and tertiary techniques to gain more oil. Actually, we found the Panhandle and Plains Museum in Canyon to be more interesting than this museum. While they had some good audio/visual displays, I felt overwhelmed with minute information.

Canyon Texas

We can tell we're in bible country, almost nothing is open on Sunday! Our visit for today was the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas. This museum has a little of everything - fossils, the history of petroleum industry, autos, rifles, history of the area, art, etc. We learned quite a few things. For example, this used to be the Great American Desert, but it was the investion of the wind mill which provided water and converted this area for ranching and farming - they had an interesting exhibit on the history of the wind mill. There was also a lot information on the ancient buffalo - modern buffalo have relatively small horns, the older the species, the wider the horns were. Some of the fossils had horns that were almost 8 feet wide. Finally, we've all heard how Henry Ford said "you can have any color, as long as it is black" of the Model T. Why black? It's because black enamel dried faster than any other color, allowing higher throughput in the factory. Amazing what little tidbits you can learn!

Capulin National Monument

Capulin Volcano

We arrived too late to visit the National Monument last night, so that was our first duty this morning. It had snowed last night, the low in the high 20's, the furnace definately did it's duty. This was also the first time we travelled with Cassie, Mary's cat. She did well during the traveling and finding a comfortable blanket to spend the night, next to Mary's pillow. Capulin Volcano was preserved as a National Monument because it almost has a perfect cinder cone. We drove up to the top and did a little exploration, particularly the beautiful views. We're right at the edge of volcanic rock versus the start of the Great Prairie. It was very visible both from the rock formations and from the snow cover (on rock) versus the grass (with less snow). The rest of the day was spent heading to Amarillo, Texas. We visited Palo Duro Canyon State Park in the late afternoon. After looking for miles at the prairie, all of a sudden there is a big canyon about a 1000 feet in depth. At the bottom is the Prarie Dog branch of the Red River. The temperatures were almost 10 degrees warmer down there - largely because the wind disappeared. This was also the site of a major Indian battle, where the U.S. Calvary killed only a few Indians, but captured or killed 1400 horses. This forced the Indians to give up and go to the reservation in Oklahoma.

Palo Duro Canyon

Colorado to Texas

Snow Storm on Monument Hill

We headed off for our Spring trip to Big Bend National Park today. We've never used our RV this early and the season, so guess what - SNOW. Yes, we actually went through two snow storms today. Monument hill was the first just outside Colorado Springs, followed by a 1/2 hour delay while they cleared the highway of an accident. And then another snow storm as we went over Raton pass on the way into New Mexico. All this to get to our first stop - Capulin Volocano National Monument.