White Sands National Monument

Yesterday we drove to White Sands National Monument, the world's largest gypsum dune field at 275 square miles of blinding white - looks like sand, dunes. Amazing. We had been to the sand dunes in Michigan but this was awesome. The surrounding San Andres and Sacramento mountain ranges, part of the original Rocky Mountain range of 70 million years ago, have gypsum within it's peaks and the ranger who talked with us showed us the white band in the mountains of where the gypsum lies. Weirdest feeling, this sand. It is so soft. And hard! We drove around the park, stopped here and there to take pictures and walk on the dunes, watched kids on saucer sleds sliding down dunes, walked the Alkali Trail for about 2 miles then headed back to get to the area where at 4pm there was a ranger guided sunset walk. Very informative. She explained different aspects of how vegetation grows, or dies, pointing out tracks in the sand, showing us how the dunes move in feet every year. One of the amazing things is you could dig about 4 inches down and find wet/water. When it rains, the water has no where to go and just sits in this basin. Did you know that gypsum is the major ingredient for dry wall? It is also in tofu, beer, shampoo, fertilizer for crops, to name a few. The 'snow plow' guy is out every day plowing the sand off the roads. Sometimes 3 times a day if it's windy. Looks like snow from a distance. The tracks in the sand typically are gone by the next day. It is amazing that most of the vegetation we saw survives - the ranger said that most have a root base of 30 to 40 feet deep to get at the water. This picture is a sumac that has roots down 30 feet and when the dunes are moving, the plant will adapt and grown deeper roots to survive. Many animals will burrow into the base to live. We were on land that belonged to the White Sands Missile Range and were treated to a number of (we think) Air Force jets flying overhead. At times you could here when they broke the sound barrier (boom!). Fortunately there wasn't any missiles or target shooting going on that day, when there is the park is closed. The sand, feels like talcum powder.

Still in Las Cruces

Has been a quiet week. We got the RV in last Monday to the dealer and they had the brakes fixed and we were back at the campsite settled by 1pm. I think until we pull the rig any distance will I feel more relaxed, still a little scared of what happened. Since last Monday we have putzed around town, Las Cruces isn't a place that we would come back to for any length of time, only for a night or two as we pass through going east or west. Very steeped in Spanish culture and everyone speaks Spanish as well. We are only 15 miles from the border of Mexico, and fortunately there isn't any problems.

We tried a couple of nights last week to catch the full moon rising over the Organ Mountains near Dripping Spring but with the fading light, this is the best I was able to capture. What struck us the most was the quietness of the area at sunset. A few birds came out but nothing else. We had to watch for rattlesnakes, thankfully didn't see or hear any. Still very dramatic. To see the lights come on over the city to the west as the sun was setting and the darkening purple/pink of the night to the east - breathtaking.

This town is very easy to get around and by the third day here we did not need a GPS. We drove down to El Paso couple of days ago to look at RVs just to get a feel of what other options we may want if we park this rig somewhere. Nothing looked appealing. Have managed to get to some great Mexican restaurants - Dave got his hot chili pepper/jalapeno breakfast fix. We will definitely do this one more time before leaving. We have sat tight since Friday since it's been overcast and dreary, catching up on things. We plan to go to White Sands National Monument tomorrow since it's the best weather day of the week. We will be leaving here hopefully by the end of the week, about 1 1/2 weeks earlier than we thought, to head to Benson, Arizona to do sightseeing. We are bored here, not alot to see or do. When we do get to Benson - about 4 hours west of here - we will be close enough to Jill and family that we could spend the holiday with them, if they will be home.

Organ Mountains and Dripping Spring

Friday we decided to go hiking, to get out of the funk of having this rig broken and knowing we cannot move until fixed. The Organ Mountains which sits on the east side of Las Cruces has an interesting history. Back in the 1870s a General Van Patton set up a mining camp and built a hotel near a spring (called Dripping Spring) for those drawn to the mountains and fresh air. A large hotel, picnic area, and even a roller skating rink was built. Then he sold it to a doctor who turned it into a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients of which his wife was afflicted. We understand during a rainy time this spring is really dripping - but all we saw was ruins of the reservoir and a slight drip-drip of water. Amazing how the buildings are still standing after all this time. Long story short, the doctor ran into financial difficulties, the sanitarium closed and the land passed to a rancher and then another. When we started out on the hike we knew it would take us up 1000 feet but what we didn't know was how hard it would be to walk this path 0f 2 miles. This area is run by the Bureau of Land Management and these folks have paved the roadway with large stones making it very difficult to walk up and very uneasy and unsteady on the way back down. Thank goodness for our walking sticks - we slipped and slid on the way down. Never the less, we did it, walked around the ruins, got some neat photos, and then rewarded ourselves afterward with a trip to Si Senor restaurant about 2 miles from our campground, one of two run by the same family, the other in Chandler, Arizona near where the grandkids live. Food was yummy but Dave suffered big time afterward because he enjoyed the hot sauces a tidge too much - many Maalox's later he finally had a settled stomach. Saturday our legs were very sore from the walk. We said we would not go back to the other walking paths there, the stones made it too difficult to comfortably walk. We have some other things on our to-do list before we leave here so we may stay for the month, or not.

Missing the Sunsets

While it is nice to be in a more southern area of New Mexico, we were spoiled with the awesome sunrises and sunsets of Santa Fe. We haven't come across these colorful skies anywhere else we have traveled. Truly amazing. Needless to say - words cannot express what you see. Here are a series of photos taken on the last night spent in Santa Fe - spectacular! I have kept these photos because some day I want to make a quilt with all these colors to remind us of this enchanted area.

Las Cruces, New Mexico

We packed up and left Santa Fe by 9:20am yesterday and the temp was a whopping 37! Brrr. Dave's fingers almost got frost bit. Drove the 280 miles south on Interstate 25 - a lovely drive but we decided we didn't want to drive that road again. Road surface was great, traffic very light, but the scenery was kinda boring. A set of mountain ranges on one side for awhile, desert conditions, then that mountain range went away and the next set of mountains appeared on our other side. We followed the Rio Grande again all the way down, crossed it a couple of times. I am still amazed that this river flows all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and for the most part -is a shallow wide river, you could wade across it. Visible were many flash flood washouts.

We made a quick stop in Truth or Consequences - New Mexicans call it T or C - (the town was renamed to this from Hot Springs because a game show host said that he would host the show from the first town that renamed itself after the show). This town is quite small and it is right near the huge Elephant Butte State Park which is New Mexico's largest - 200 miles of shoreline. You can see the lake from I25 but from what we saw was quite muddy and very low. New Mexico is experiencing a drought and we saw it via the Rio Grande and also some of the dams and reservoirs we toured while in Santa Fe.

Got to this campground, Sunny Acres, just west of the town and registered and pulled up to the site to see how we would back in. And got into trouble. Our emergency brake system for the trailer locked up and it caused the tires to freeze. Could not budge the thing at all. Dave ended up cutting the wires just to get us in the sight. Can you imagine if this would have happened while on the road going 60 miles an hour? We were lucky we were in a safe place and could still maneuver the rig into the spot. We have since put a claim into our Jayco dealer and on Monday we will limp into the dealer about 1 1/2 miles away (thankfully that close). The good news is that it was 76 when we got here at 2:30pm. I saw where Santa Fe had a temp of 18 last night - are we lucky, or what? Our plans are to get this rig fixed and stay until the beginning of December, then we will move to Picacho Peak north of Tucson and south of Casa Grande for about a month, or two?

White Rock and Bandelier National Monument

With yesterday a clear blue sky and temp about 60 we decided to go exploring again. We drove to White Rock, a small community near Los Alamos, and walked the Blue Dot Trail of the White Rock Canyon. This canyon was carved out by the thousands of years of erosion of the Rio Grande. Can't say the colors were spectacular, but the scenery was magnificent. Black lava rock and dirt made up the entire walk and we saw the Rio Grande's full-force on how it carved out the area. It was too steep to crawl down and walk along the river so we just took the rim walk. From this walk we decided to drive towards Bandelier National Monument in Los Alamos and just do a drive tour. The fire from June which destroyed over 60% of the park and it's surroundings was evident everywhere we looked. In order to visit the NM you had to take a shuttle in - the parking area was also destroyed not only from the fire but the flash flood in August that took out many roads as well. Los Alamos is known for it's leading role in coordinating and leading the development of the atomic bomb back in the early 1940's and this complex is still going strong and has diversified. We had to pass through a security check at one point. We wonder how they managed to escape the fire - we could not see any damage to the buildings.

After driving around Bandelier and Alamos, we started back on the road towards Santa Fe when we passed a sign showing Tsankawi Prehistoric Site Trail of Bandelier National Monument and decided to stop and see what this was all about. I had read that there were ruins and a hiking trail that showed hieroglyphics. What a neat trail! We saw cliff dwellings, ancient ruins where the ancient Pueble Indians lived, cave dwellings and some of the hieroglyphics. And did we get filthy dirty in the process. The trail is carved out of white tuff ash and over the centuries you can see the foot prints of people as well as animals that traveled on the cliffs. If you look closely at the picture you can see one of the ladders we had to climb. making the hike a little hairy. I am not sure I would hike this trail again - we had to wrench our legs and bodies in places just to move forward. At the end of the trail we heard alot of birds and thought they were nesting inside many of the caves we saw. However, after the first wave of birds calls died down, they started up again in another direction. It was snow geese flying south for the winter and their calls were echoing off the cliffs. We saw hundreds if not thousands of these birds overhead. How cool!

Cochiti Dam and Tent Rocks National Monument

We survived the storm, thankfully only got spurts of snow flurries but lots of rain. When the sun finally peeked out on Friday morning there was snow again on the surrounding mountain ranges. Yesterday we had cabin fever and with the sun shining brightly and the promise of a nice day, we took a drive about 15 miles south of Santa Fe to the Cochiti Dam which is one of the Army Corp of Engineers' dams built to help ease flooding of the Rio Grande River. In the visitor's center we watched movie clips and learned alot about this river which originates in Creed, Colorado and flows all the way to the Gulf of Mexico by Brownsville. Amazing that last winter we not only crossed this same river in Los Ebanos, TX but we biked along the same river in Bentson State Park near McAllen, TX. We hiked one of the trails around the visitor center which eventually takes you to an overlook of the reservoir made from the dam. Very pretty area, a small Hobie cat sailing out on the lake and we saw camping on one side of the reservoir. The camping area is run by the Corp but it only has electric, not water. We don't like living like this in the RV so unfortunately while these campgrounds are very pretty and cheap ($10/night), we would not go there because we don't want to have to worry about getting water into tanks and then dumping when we leave.

From Cochiti Dam we drove about 5 miles south and stopped at Kasha-Katuwe (which means white cliffs) Tent Rocks National Monument, on the Cochiti Pueblo Indian Reservation and run by the Pueblo and the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management. And again, we are glad Dave has the pass into the National Parks because the fee is waived if you have the pass. As we got within 1 mile of the monument we were awed by what we saw. Cone-shaped tent rock formations are from the products of volcanic eruptions that occurred over 7 million years ago and left ash, pumice and tuff deposits over 1000 feet thick. Pretty cool cones and way on top of the mountain - looks like a basketball sitting on a cone. We walked the cave loop trail which took us by a cave that was dug out by early man and you can still see the smoke stains on the cave roof. Signs said to beware of snakes which we didn't see but we were alert at all times. Large black crows flew overhead making strange muted sounds and their 'caw-caw' to each other was a treat to watch and hear.

Red Sky In Morning...

For many years Dave and I had a sailboat which we sailed on Lake Erie and we knew this saying by heart, and followed it's warnings....Red sky in morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight. Which means red sky in morning, there is bad weather coming soon. Red sky at night - a beautiful day tomorrow. This is what we saw this morning at 7am out our dining window, looking west towards the Jemez Mountains. Oh boy are we in for it! The forecast for today is falling temperatures, rain throughout the day, turning into snow showers by 8pm with temps dropping into the mid 20's overnight. But, tomorrow the temps raise again to the mid 50's and this front will be long gone. We also saw a double rainbow not long after this picture was taken, Dave ran outside to take photos and bam - the rain started.

Right now, noonish, the sun is out, the wind is howling, and the outside temperature has dropped 10 degrees from a high of 56 at 10:30am and falling steadily. We are prepared for winter even if it's a quick 24 hour stint. This campground has sights for 150 rv's and right now about 25 are left. As I said the other day - mass exodus to south. One couple we talked to on Sunday said they were leaving on Monday to go to Durango - well, we hope they made it because Colorado is being hit with a winter storm and they were driving right into it. We also can see snow on the mountains now where it wasn't there about 5 hours ago. Better on the mountains than here! We make it through the next day or so and we are good. We have decided to move to Las Cruces which is 40 miles north of El Paso, TX sometime early next week. Distance is 270 miles south - and we are amazed that just this small distance will make our life more easy.

Abiqui'u and Jemez Mountains

There is an impending snow storm coming in tomorrow night into Thursday with temperatures dropping into the 20's at night and only 40 during the day - so, we decided to take advantage of the really nice weather yesterday and ride up into the mountains west of Santa Fe. Most of the information you read about Santa Fe keeps pointing to the picturesque sandstone formations and mountains that Georgia O'Keeffe painted and we went to find out if it was true. As we drove north and west we passed numerous small towns where the remains of ancient Pueblos are and these small towns are inhabited by Native American Indians. There are 19 Pueblos in New Mexico and each Pueblo settlement has a casino within the reservation. We were surprised at how busy each casino was. We drove to Abiqui'u (AB-ih-cue) where Georgia first set up a paint studio and gallery and she stayed there until she purchased a ranch (Ghost Ranch) some 30 miles more north of Abiqui'u some 10 years later. We were wow'd big time. We stopped at the Abiqui'u Dam run by the Army Corp of Engineers. Beautiful area. We definitely saw where Georgia got her inspiration from to paint, the red rock cliffs in the background, the crystal blue skies. From this area we then drove into the Jemez Mountains which is reported as a scenic byway which winds through the mountains and the Santa Fe National Forest south into Albuquerque. Every turn - wow. At one point we crossed over the Continental Divide - and when we did - we both remarked about our hiking adventure in the Rocky Mountains. I felt sorry for Dave - asking him to pull over so I could take pictures. There is so much history in this area that we have decided that we need to come back some day and explore the area to it's fullest. What we are surprised about - we thought we would be in warmer weather, similar to El Paso, TX but we are too close to the Continental Divide and the mountains and therefore, cold nights are the norm. We will move soon to much farther south to where we don't have to worry about disconnecting our water hose at night and bringing it in, and running heaters to stay warm. For the rest of the week, as we prepare for the storm, we will just hunker down and watch the world go by.

Taos Pueblo, Place of the Red Willows

I got back here to Santa Fe from my 10 day visit to Phoenix on Wednesday and yesterday we decided to head up to Taos to see the Pueblo. The drive to Taos took us on a scenic route through the Rio Grande Gorge - beautiful with the cottonwoods and willows in their golden fall colors and a river that flows along the roadway. We noticed that snow on the mountains was still evident from the snowfall over 2 weeks ago, we were at an elevation of about 5600 feet, climbing to about 7000 feet by the time we got to Taos. Taos Pueblo, "Place of the Red Willows" is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the USA. Scientists have dated the Pueblo to at least over 1000 years old and the Native Americans who live there say it is as old as creation according to their oral traditions. The details of their traditional values are guarded as sacred and will not be divulged because of their past history of oppression and slavery. Today over 1000 Tiwas live in the community of Taos and of the 1000 about 100 still live inside the Pueblo. No electricity, no water, the only amenity is wood stoves and the occasional use of propane. We were quite impressed with the day, finding out that of all the Pueblos in New Mexico, we visited the one and only Pueblo that was inscribed in 1992 by the World Heritage list by USESCO as the first living world heritage location. This means that Taos Pueblo has aboriginal status to the land and the continent.

The Pueblo has it's own tribal council and its officials and warchiefs are elected every year and has the duty to protect the wildlife and natural resources as well as the civil and business issues within the village and the relations of the non-Indian world. As you look at this picture you see colored doors which is the Spanish influence of the 1600's. Over the centuries Spain has tried to rule the Tiwas but the Tiwas revolted. Then the US Government came in and ruled the area and again the Tiwas revolted and murdered Governor Bent, thinking he and his people were gone, the Tiwas were again free in following their culture. But, the Army came in and with the Mexican/American war of the 1847 New Mexico became a US territory but allowed the Tiwas their continuing living conditions in the Pueblo. The buildings are made out of adobe, a mixture of water, straw and earth and must be maintained and replastered every year. Artists and craftsmen were located inside the village and you could purchase anything from bread, pastries, jewelry, artwork, paintings, drums, flutes, music, leathergoods. It was sad to see how the economy has also hit these people - many people just looked and didn't buy any of the goods. I on the other hand - supported them. I bought some yummy pastry, got some jewelry and an ornament. Very talented people!