Howdy, Campers! It's
Silver Cliche' here with you again. This time from Santa Rosa Lake
State Park in Guadalupe County, New Mexico. Some people think Texas
is “west”. We're even “wester” than than now.
I try to keep the
focus of these posts on the positive side… you know… sights that
were seen, “eatin' local” and getting a little elbow rub on us
from the folks we meet. I have to point out now and again that this
travelin', writin' and photographin' sometimes carries a price. When
we checked into Palo Duro yesterday afternoon I explained to the nice
lady dressed like Smoky the Bear (if she needs a killer costume for
Halloween all she needed to add is the bear mask… a sure prize
winner!) that we are retired, like to be in a quiet corner of the
campgrounds we visit and don't need proximity to the “facilities”
since we are self contained. She pointed out a place that fit the
bill. I asked “Is there anyone else down that way? Particularly in
these two spots on either side of us?” She looked it up and said
“Those are empty and that whole section only has a few other
campers”. Excellent! Off we went. At the time we arrived, what she
said was true. Slowly over the hours it became less so. The whole
plan landed in the crapper when the campsite immediately next to us…
wait… worse yet… on the side where our entrance door is located
became occupied. Up pulled a major sized white passenger van towing a
small black trailer. Not a travel trailer, a cargo trailer. Out of
the van come mom and dad and nine, count 'em, nine kids. Plus a dog.
The swarm the campsite as I'm grilling dinner and in a model of
industrial organization they extract from the trailer enough camping
gear to serve a family of eleven and erect two tents. One is the size
of the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone (a 6 or 7 story tall log
structure of unimaginable grandeur). The kids are actually amazing.
The one dog in the group… not so much. That fleabag barked every
five minutes for hours. Somehow at 9:00 literally as I put my shoes
on to go ask them to shut him up, he stopped. He stopped until 7:30
AM when the whole thing started again.
Anyhow, the sun came
up today. The coffee was good as usual, the reading was off since the
internet was inaccessible on the floor of Palo Duro Canyon (primitive
alert!) and by 10:00 we were pulling out of the campground.Here's our last view of Palo Duro:
We took the fastest
route which was mostly interstate and zero city. We were near to but
didn't even see Amarillo (there may be no tall buildings… I don't
know). After an hour or so we left Texas moving 68 MPH on I-40 and
pointed 270 on the compass. Due west! I have not mentioned altitude
in any of my posts this trip. You probably figured out that along the
coast we were slightly above sea level except in Louisiana where we
were slightly below at times (seriously… parts of Louisiana,
especially in New Orleans, are below sea level thanks to levees and
pumps… hurricane Katrina pointed out some of the challenges with
that system). As we moved through Texas we climbed slowly to about
1,500 feet above sea level. Yesterday we topped 3,000 and today we
hit over 5,000 feet above sea level at one point before settling back
a bit as we neared camp. I might add that about 15 miles before we
left the panhandle of Texas the terrain changed again. It changed
abruptly. After spending hundreds of miles in the flattest grassland
plains you have ever seen in an instant we came over a little rise
and it was over. In its place you could see geographic features with
names we Floridians hardly ever get to use. There were hills (the
highest point in all of Florida is less than 400' above sea level…
it's the flattest state in the Union although Kansas has a better
marketing department) and mesas and buttes and coulees and draws and
a whole bunch of other terms I couldn't properly use in a sentence.
New Mexico is a state with lots of things in the distance. More on
that later. There are two reasons for this: 1.) along with a change
in topography came a change in vegetation – less stuff grows here
and what does grow is shorter and 2.) the air is dry (I'm guessing
that's connected to the land being dry and my skin blowing away.
We've only been west of the Mississippi for a few days and I'm
chalkier than Richard Prior) so even far off things are visible. In
Florida we sometimes can't see from one end of the driveway to the
other due to humidity. Here it's easy to see things that are probably
40 or 50 miles away. Anyway, the undulations of the land and what
grows on it changed almost at the flick of a switch just before the
New Mexico border.
By then it was
getting close to lunch time. We looked ahead on the internet and
picked a town (Tucumcari) and a place Kix on 66 and set course. Now
Tucumcari is a place I had never heard of and still can't pronounce
(I didn't know the Incas settled this far north but based on this
town name, it seems as though they did). But I was familiar with the
reference made in the name of the reference. Tucumacari's main street
is a section of the old “Route 66”. Known to many as “the
mother road” it was formed in 1926 by applying the route number to
a group of existing roads that ran from Chicago to Santa Monica,
California – over 2,600 miles. Remember, this was two years before
Henry Ford started producing the Model A. So we ate lunch on Route
66. There was absolutely nothing photogenic about Tucumcari. In fact,
it had more abandoned gas stations and derelict motels per mile than
any town we've been to.
After lunch it was
another 70 minutes across I-40 and we entered Santa Rosa Lake. Like
many places we've camped at, this lake is here because of another
damn project by the Corps of Engineers. Sorry. That's a typo. This
lake was created by a US Army Corps of Engineers dam project in the
1970s. They dammed the Pecos River and made a lake for flood control
and irrigation. It's big. 26 square miles of water. The thing that
amazed me as we drove across the top of the dam to get to the
campground is that there was a spillway very near the dam height.
This is common in dams and allows the biggest floods to bypass the
dam and not erode and undermine the dam itself. The logic goes
“better to let some water flow unimpeded around the dam than
attempt to contain it only to have the excess destroy the dam and
release the whole lake at once”. I like that kind of thinking. When
we compared the spillway height to the current lake level (which is
considered just about right for normal lake use) there must have been
100' vertical height between the current water level and the
spillway. On researching the dam I learned that the lake normally
holds 200 trillion something or another (pints, I think is the dam
builders preferred unit of measure… or acre feet… or something…
anyway, this dam holds back 200 of them) but can hold over 700. In
other words, they are prepared to hold nearly 4 times as much water
at peak as at normal. I would not want to be here when that happened.
In fact, I could not be here when that happened… the campground we
are in would be underwater. Here's a panorama of Santa Rosa Lake:
When I walked around
I realized that there are two stories here. There is the gross
geography with incredible long vistas, occasional impressive features
on a grand scale and man made wonders like the dam and its lake.
That's the story of the west as seen in Cinemascope. But the real
story in on the fine scale. Looking in closer, the general pattern here is this:
Not much to look at, but when examined more closely it's clear that there is variety and detail all around.
Here is a sampling of pictures I took within 10 minutes and within a
radius of maybe 150'
So let me leave you
for tonight with a thought. Here in New Mexico it seems that there is
always something on the horizon, always something out there to see
and something to call you onward. In the midst of all the flowers and
cacti and rocks I saw some buttes (or maybe a ridge or a falderal…
I don't know… I'm not from around here) off in the distance. “Hey”,
I thought “those are in the direction we're heading. Maybe we can
go see those tomorrow. Here, take a look:
And so, tomorrow we
head on continuing west. We'll be camping between Albuquerque and
Santa Fe coulees on a lake make by another dam project of those Corps
of Engineers folks (what are they, the Army's answer to beavers?).
Until then…
SC'
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