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.