Monday, 8 November 2021
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| today's route |
Despite knowing Google thought this would be a 4-hour drive, and despite knowing it would actually take me closer to 7 or 8 hours, I didn't leave my friends until 9:00, wanting to cram in some last minute visiting.
I heard on the radio there's some controversy about proposed changes to NM's school curriculum. Not counting the disagreement about teaching kids to respect differences in the cultures of their classmates (NM is 50% Hispanic and 10% Native American, so these lessons seem logical but are upsetting lots of people), the proposed science curriculum was under attack.
Changes would have included the actual age of the Earth, information about human evolution, and information about climate change. Those provisions were taken out of the draft, thanks to anti-science adherents, an action that generated a massive backlash from scientists and regular people. So now having support, NM was able to put that stuff back in the curriculum and NM schoolchildren will be allowed to learn reality. I'm comforted by knowing that this sort of thing isn't new and has been going on for decades. Maybe centuries. And we still haven't imploded.
We stopped at Moriarty again, to walk in their nice little park, and then drove for a very long way through not much more than yellow grass. For many miles we saw low rolling hills with yellow grass. Then the view included various cacti. Later the cactus petered out and I started seeing juniper mixed in with the yellow grass. Farther along, no more juniper but plenty of sage mixed in with the yellow grass. You can tell this area isn't one thrill after another, though it's attractive in its own way.
I passed a herd of cows gathered near a large water trough. I passed a large flock of sheep.
We stopped at Encino, elev. 6,280', to take a walk and eat some lunch. It's the sort of place that has the village hall combined with the library in the same very old building. It looked like a farming town to me.
We passed an enormous boulder - maybe 6' tall and 10' diameter - and the fence for the field it sat by went around it to close it out. I wondered if it had been left behind by a retreating glacier, but I can't find anything online that says there were glaciers this far south.
We passed the town of Vaugh, "Crossroads of New Mexico" they say, based apparently on US-285, that I was on, crossing US-54 there.
Out in the middle of nothing, I passed 2 huge sculptures - maybe 15' or 20' high, one on either side of the road. Both were cowboys. One was pointing his finger at the other, who was sagging back as if shot. Really. No sign, no explanation. Just these cowboys.
I passed the turn leading to Fort Sumner Historic Site. I had a hard time finding information about why this place is considered worth preserving but, according to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/Ft-Sumner-NM there are 2 reasons.
One is that it was built in the first place to supervise the forced internment and mistreatment of 2 tribes of Native Americans: the Navajo and the Mescalero Apache. https://www.nmhistoricsites.org/bosque-redondo The other reason for preserving this site is that it's the gravesite for Billy the Kid. It's still not clear to me how he got to be so famous so many years after his death. He was a fast shot and he killed people. At least Wyatt Earp, who did both, was also a respected lawman. Anyway, Ft. Sumner is now also a town with about 1,000 residents, if you want to visit.
I started seeing hay fields that were being harvested. Also occasional herds of cows or flocks of sheep.
We stopped at Roswell, elevation 3,570', taking a break at their convention center where there was some green space for us to walk. Roswell is home to the New Mexico Military Institute, a land grant school, and the only state-supported military college in the western US. It has a beautiful campus.
I passed the turn for the Bottomless Lakes State Park. They're a group of 9 small deep lakes that formed when caves in the limestone reef collapsed and filled with water. It's a much-touted local attraction.
As I drove south, I continued to pass large grain fields, all of them harvested and some that appeared to have been replanted. I wondered if winter wheat would survive snow and winter conditions here, and the internet tells me it can survive in northern Minnesota, so I guess the answer is yes.
The rolling hills I saw all morning have been left behind. Here the land is all flat. I'm still seeing lots of yellow grass interspersed with cactus, but now I'm also seeing lots of grain fields.
I passed a CCC historical marker, documenting a CCC camp nearby where the young men improved water sources and developed grazing lands for both livestock and wildlife. And at the town of Artesia, I passed another historical marker, this one telling me Artesia has more than 10,000 residents, sits at 3,350', and was named for the numerous artesian wells in the area.
I heard on the radio that there's a large nuclear waste storage site near Carlsbad that was reporting safety problems. This sounded ominous to me so I looked it up. This first article from the site itself is general information that I hadn't known. https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site And this second one, which uses so many acronyms that I found it hard to follow, still provides information about the current safety concern, which sounds like there's good reason to be concerned. https://www.currentargus.com/wipp-safety-issues-slow-disposal-nuclear-waste
Then I heard something related to this nuclear storage site that sounded even more ominous. Scientists in Texas and New Mexico have tied the recent rise in low-level earthquakes in the SW TX/SE NM area to the oil and gas industry. Specifically, to fracking. It's not the extraction of the actual oil and gas that's the problem but dealing with the brine they're mixed with. As much as 10 times more brine than oil/gas, in fact. Nobody wants the brine and they have to do something with it, so they've been injecting it deep back into the ground. Seems logical since it came from the ground in the first place, but the Earth doesn't see it that way. I guess it's being injected much deeper into the ground than where it started out and there's a staggering quantity of it. And it's triggering earthquakes. The NM state scientist I heard on the radio said they've been able to track a shotgun-blast pattern of injection well sites around nuclear waste sites in both SE NM and West Texas - including the Carlsbad storage site (above). So far the quakes haven't been any stronger than 4.0 - but that's not nothing, and if it affects these underground nuclear sites, it could be catastrophic. If you're interested, I found a local news article about it. https://capitalandmain.com/rise-in-nm-earthquakes-and-the-oil-industry
And I began to see many oil wells along the road, some working and some not. So this is certainly petroleum industry territory.
And I came to tonight's campsite, which is actually about 20 miles from Carlsbad itself.
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