Our Dumb Blog

Apache National Forest, AZ–Meteor Crater, AZ

The roads in Arizona suck. The roads in New Mexico were quite nice; apparently NM has lots of highway money it doesn’t know what to do with, because they stick signs up everywhere. Every time you pass over a culvert, there are dozens of black and yellow striped signs warning you that, if you need to veer off the road, don’t do it right now. Every time the center line changes from broken to solid, a sign on the side of the road will warn you, “NO PASSING ZONE” or “PASS WITH CARE.” I suppose that might be useful if the road were snow-covered, but this is New Mexico we’re talking about. Berck says, “I find these signs almost insulting.”

But the roads in Arizona are pretty bad. Makes typing tricky at times, reading back over what I wrote unpleasant, especially since we’re cruising at 90.

We stopped for the night at a little green tent on the side of the road in a National Forest(according to the map). It was actually a couple mile drive, the last half mile of which was mud or snow. We finally got to the campground, eerily deserted. There was no place to pay for camping, a bunch of the signs were missing. One sign that still stood said, “Check in with host! –>”

The only thing in the direction of the “host” was a snowy path leading to some wood cabins. So after we picked our site, we headed down the path. There were actually dozens of cabins, but they were all abandoned. Inside each was a couple of mattresses, bed frames, refrigerator, tiny stove, and sink. All the windows were missing, and most of the doors had been broken in. Saplings grew up around them. It looked as if it had been a motel made up of individual cabins that been left to rot. The complex was getting some good use, though … brightly colored little balls were strewn everywhere in the snow. It had become the perfect place for a paint ball game.

Other than the spookiness of our campground’s status, it only had two drawbacks: it was cold, and there was no drinking water available. This was a problem because we only had about half a liter of extra-strong lemonade to drink. We were surrounded by patches of snow, and a creek ran nearby, but we don’t have a pot or water purification devices. It was getting too late to go anywhere else, and Berck had already gotten the car stuck in the snow once.

At least there was plenty of firewood, including some National Forest sign posts that had been sawed up and stuck in a pile. I’m not sure if they were meant for firewood, but one of those huge logs made a nice fire. We had some hot soup and some HOT Wolf chili, unfortunately, since we didn’t have any drinking water to wash it down. But we ate a couple of oranges and felt better.

We ended up saving the lemonade for the morning. That was a mistake, because it got so cold that the lemonade froze solid. We were warm enough in our sleeping bags, but to conserve heat, we partially closed the vent in the top of the tent. That was also a mistake, because we woke up to find the inside of the tent covered in frost that was quickly melting and raining on us. Hopefully, our tent and accouterments will have time to dry out tonight before we have to re-enter them.

We just passed through Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. Most of the “forest” has been carted out over the last hundred and fifty years by souvenir hunters and gem enthusiasts. Petrified wood is beautiful stuff. Fortunately, there’s probably a bunch of it still buried beneath the hills, waiting for the nine inches of rain the park receives to uncover it all.

Now we’re driving through Winslow, AZ listening to The Eagles’ “Take It Easy.”

We’re back on an Interstate, having left them pretty much behind since San Antonio. Wrestling with truckers again.

Just went to the Meteor Crater. 12 bucks a person to get in! They’ve surrounded the crater with three miles of chain-link and barbed-wire to make sure you don’t get a free look at it. It’s big. Twenty foot-ball games with two million seated spectators could fit in it. All from a chunk of rock 150 feet in diameter. At least they’ve got a decent “State of the Art Museum.” My favorite was the meteor generator, where you got to pick the velocity, size, density, and angle of a meteor hitting the earth, then watch animation of the consequences.

Very Large Array, NM

We just visited the Very Large Array Radio Telescope. It’s the array of radio dishes featured in the film Contact (which is the first movie Berck and I ever went to see together … awww). The visitor center had a little display about the making of the movie. They seemed very excited about it but were careful to point out that creative license had been taken … for instance, you don’t listen to radio telescopes with headphones, like Jodie Foster did.

There’s a little walking tour that visitors like us could take, right up to one of the dishes. The array is pretty amazing. Each dish is the size of a baseball diamond. There are 27 dishes, 9 on each arm of the array. When the astronomers want to see something really, really far away, they put the dishes out so that each arm is 13 miles long … that’s long enough so that if the VLA were centered in Washington, DC, each arm would extend beyond the Beltway. When the astronomers want to see something with greater resolution, they bring the dishes in close so that all of them are within .4 mile. 27 smaller radio telescopes spread out but working together can “see” as well as one huge dish. The VLA is the most powerful radio telescope on earth. But the VLA is part of an even larger array, the Very Large Baseline Array, with radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands.

The VLA is on a high plain (7000 ft) in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. The plain is surrounded by mountains to shield the radio telescopes from radio transmissions from cities, of which there are none close by. When the dishes are spread out at their furthest, they reach the edges of the mountains.

Berck and I wonder how many non-scientists have seen both the VLA and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, the largest single dish on earth, like we have.

El Paso, TX–Lincoln National Forest, NM

We spent last night in a little campground at the edge of a National Forest. It was a 12.5 mile drive off the highway to get there, the last 4 of which were gravel. The Miata can handle graded gravel roads just fine, but it doesn’t have much clearance. We often have to travel along the ridges of the ruts to keep from scraping bottom.

As we entered the campground, the host emerged from his camper, which looked like it had sat in the same place for quite some time, and came to meet us. He was wearing Marine issue BDU pants, a sweat shirt, Ray-Bans, a little hoop earring, and had a red beard down to his chest. “How do you fit it all in?!” he exclaimed, looking at our trunk. His Australian shepherd stuck his nose into the car and sniffed around. The host told us where the best sites were. “You’ll probably see my horse running around too.” Sure enough, we rounded a bend to see a shaggy little horse standing on the side of the road, looking a little surprised to see us.

Our host coasted up to our campsite on his motorcycle as we were putting up the tent. “Seen any of those deer?” he asked. “Me and my horse were chasing some up there before I put my horse up for the night. I just had dinner: elk liver and onions! Tomorrow night it’ll be heart.”

Berck piped up, “I guess it’s a pretty rough night when you’ve got to eat the hoofs!”

The campground is located just in the foothills beneath the only snowcapped mountain in the area. It’s a beautiful spot, and we had the whole thing to ourselves. Plus, it is in a National Forest, which are much less Nazi-ish than National Parks, so we could build a fire! We built one from green juniper branches some idiot camper had chopped down, but which burned nicely in a hot fire, and some yucca stalks, which ignite quite well but smell like burned corn. We heated up some Chunky’s Soup and baked beans and grilled some sour dough bread and felt quite satisfied.

It got cold last night, though the drinking water didn’t freeze. Tonight I’ll have to try sleeping with more clothes on.

We bought Berck some long underwear at Wal-mart in El Paso yesterday, but after trying them last night, he swears he’ll never wear that pair again because they “get” him.

Guadalupe National Park, TX–White Sands National Park, NM

We’re on our way to El Paso, having left our lovely campsite in Guadalupe National Park. Apparently, everyone else thought it was lovely too, because both nights some campers pulled in past dark, drove around the entire campground, and pitched camp right across from site. Out of a whole campground, why did they have to be so close to us? At least they were mostly interested in sleeping, so they didn’t bother us too much.

We arrived at Guadalupe National Park at two in the afternoon day before yesterday. We hadn’t even heard of the park before we began looking for a place to camp near Carlsbad Caverns. We had an afternoon to kill before going to the Caverns the next day, so we thought we’d look around the park.

We picked the shortest trail to hike, a four mile round trip to “Devil’s Hall.” Most of the trail was up a dry wash and involved as much scrambling over white rocks as actual hiking. The trail didn’t rise much in elevation, which was nice. We followed the dry creek bed to the right when the valley forked. When that valley seemed to veer to the left, the way narrowed to a gap between two natural pillars of stone. Then it turned sharply to the left up a 15 feet wide and 10 feet high staircase of broken sedimentary layers of rock. We climbed up it, wondering what this place would look like in a flash flood. Another five minutes up the path, and the trail was walled in on either side by a narrow canyon, ten to twelve feet wide. The narrow canyon was about 50 feet long. We climbed up the boulders at the other end of the narrow passage to find a sign saying, “END OF TRAIL.” We hiked back before the sun set.

Now we’re heading north through New Mexico. We stopped by White Sands today. Gypsum sand is really cool. It’s water soluble, but White Sands is in a basin that water doesn’t escape, so the gypsum dries and gets blown into huge sand dunes. Gypsum sand is really easy to walk on if it has rained and then dried because it stays clumped. The roads throughout the park are just packed sand, probably snowplowed down. We trudged up a really big dune and overlooked the park … then slid down the other side.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM

Today we visited Carlsbad Caverns. Wow! They are very cool. If you want a bigger cavern, you have to go to Borneo.

We spent the morning in the city of Carlsbad. We stopped at a RV campground and paid to take showers (ahhhh!) and do laundry. The proprietor even gave us two showers for the price of one. While our clothes were drying, we went to the grocery store and bought some “cold” food. We’re camping at Guadalupe National Park, and no fires are permitted, so we can’t heat up cans of soup as we’d like. Then we had some more time to kill before our dryer time ran out, so we stopped at a Mexican restaurant. Unfortunately, it was closed (it being Sunday and all, but it’s hard keeping track of the days of the week). So we went down the road a ways to another Mexican restaurant. Its parking lot was full! Unfortunately, it was also full of white people, including wait staff. Our usual policy is if a Mexican restaurant has any white people in it at all, it’s got to be expensive and bland. But we ordered anyway. Sure enough, both rules of thumb were true. At least we had refillable fountain drinks (a Coke for me and a Dr Pepper for Berck) and complementary sopapillas.

The waitress was a little later than we would have liked delivering our ticket, but we were soon back at the RV stop. Only to find out that the office was closed from noon to one. ARGH! How were we going to get our laundry? What were we going to do for an hour? We pondered this for a few minutes. I was worried that we wouldn’t have enough time to explore Carlsbad Caverns (and indeed we wouldn’t…the last entry into the cave is at 2 o’clock, and the Caverns are a bit of a drive away).

I was so frustrated. This was our day to see the Caverns! “Everything happens for a reason,” I reminded myself. I truly believe this. Call it superstition, call it faith in providence, call it predestination. So I calmed down. Then I wondered if there were a back door to the office and laundry room. I walked around past the showers, and an ajar door led to a game room. I walked through the game room and and looked for another door. There was the laundry room! Unlocked and open! Berck and I agreed that we would have looked pretty silly sitting there waiting for the office to reopen when we didn’t even need to walk through it.

We were folding the clothes when suddenly my bowels insisted on emptying themselves NOW. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I told Berck. I stuffed my bag shut and ran for the bathroom. Yikes! Five minutes later I felt a lot better. Berck finished up folding his clothes and was on his way back to the car when suddenly he realized why I had had to go. After he spent five minutes in the bathroom, we were ready to go. We decided that the “Mexican” restaurant was to blame. We’ve been just fine for the rest of the day.

As I think back, if the waitress hadn’t been slow delivering our check, and if we hadn’t dawdled bemoaning the loss of our laundry, we would have been down the road too far to be in sight of a bathroom. There’s NOTHING for the 20 miles between the city of Carlsbad and the Caverns.

I’d like to write about our wonderful hike in Guadalupe National Park yesterday, but we’re back at the campsite, and the computer can’t run off the car’s power anymore.