What a day! Mountains, long winding roads, 700 year old cliff houses, whip scorpions, wild pigs, white sand dunes formed by an ancient sea swimming with sharks that now look like snow, and a final stop where you can see the lights of Mexico.
A good lightning storm lit up our window for most the night.The morning brought mostly sunny skies with the remnants of last nights storms pouring water over portions of the Gila wilderness. The drive to the cliff dwellings meanders down a winding road in the mountains. This is the prettiest part of New Mexico yet. The trees are fairly thick and the hills are dotted with deer and squirrels. The deer here have the largest ears we have ever seen. Thinking maybe they were crossed with jack rabbits. 2 hours later we finally reached the entrance to the Gila Gliff Dwelling national monument, us and 2 other cars. Its amazing how anything taking a slight bit more time or more effort keeps people out; so many things are missed that way. A one mile loop takes you up to the 700 year old homes of the Mongolon people. Here they built walls to divide large caves in the hill up into rooms where they lived. 700 year old corn cobs were strewn about on the floor and you are encouraged to dig around in the dirt to find artifacts; you can look and touch as long as you put it back exactly as you found them (meaning re-buried). We were warned to look for black tailed rattle snakes, scorpions, and pack rats, but the only thing we saw during our climb up and through the caves were spiny lizards and one whip scorpion. The lizards are fat little things that must be eating good. The look friendly like they want to be picked up, but just like the plants here, it seems that may come with a cost of bloody hands.
I wanted to see a roadrunner bird and mom was hoping for wild pigs, mom won. As we pulled out headed to our next adventure, two wild pigs ran across the road. Ugly things really with dirty course hair and short little legs. They were not interested in posing for a picture but instead grunted their displeasure at our shrieking and ran into the tall grass. Chris, the ever reasonable member of our group, advised us that if we stopped shrieking at wildlife we might get a better look. Maybe next time.
Roads here are an interesting thing to me. When it rains in the mountains, it apparently has no where to go up there so it runs down the mountain in ugly brown rushing masses filling dry creek beds in matters of seconds. If a road happens to cross one of these areas, it simply drops down into the bottom of the creek bed and back up the other side. This allows the water to simply continue on its way uninterrupted to somewhere I am not sure of. When its dry this creates a fun roller coaster like drive up in and over these creeks. I do not want to be present for what this looks like when it does choose to rain.
Headed South East we pondered the reason for all the Yucca plants. There must be something one can do with all of these Yucca plants. The natives used them to make sandals and pots as well as for food and they even made needles for sewing out of the ends of the "leaves". Yeah, they are that sharp, I touched them. Around and over some more mountains we dropped into another giant "valley" (valley's are supposed to be green) headed for the white sands national park. Here the ocean used to fill this space and sharks swam around looking for prey. What was left behind was a large sand dune of snow white sand. It looks like a good winter in Tahoe and because of the type of sand it a harder surface and cool to the touch even though its 104 degrees outside. The claim to fame here is "sledding" on the "snow". Neat idea, and the pictures look pretty cool, but sand has a lot of friction to it and sleds just dont go down very well even if you cover them in wax. We took the drive and did some walking anyway. At 104 degrees in the desert where there is NOTHING but sand that isnt as fun as it sounds.
This area of New Mexico is home to a missile range. From time to time (pretty regularly actually) they shut down the park as well as the highway running through this area and test missiles. The fences along the highway say things like, "do not exit the highway at any time" and "live ammunition". The park warns you that foreign objects should not be touched as they may still be live and could detonate at any time. Neat. Ignoring that, our discoveries included tracks of the ear less bleached lizard, the white cricket, and the roadrunner. Only one actual live cricket and one dead beetle were visible; I assume everyone was hiding from the heat.
Our final stop tonight is in El Paso, Texas. We can see Mexico from here. The lights of one city blending into the other. We went through 2 border patrol checks in New Mexico. As you drive up the the checkpoint, about 15 cameras appears to be scanning your car. Once up to the front you are asked if everyone is an American Citizen, we all answered yes, but Im not sure how you prove that if needed since no one brought a passport; our plans didnt include exiting the country. Much more exciting than the fruit checkpoint one goes through in California.
"To those devoid of imagination, a blank spot on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part." Aldo Leopold
Until Tomorrow.
