02/26/01:
I left Pine Springs Campground in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park heading for Dog Canyon Campground, also in the park. By trail it is 12 miles between the campgrounds. By road it's more like 112 miles, no kidding. You have to drive around the mountains, into New Mexico, through the Lincoln National Forest and then back into Texas and the Guadalupe Mountains.
Carlsbad Caverns National Park is on the way in New Mexico. I stopped off there and had a great time. There's no camping in this national park or I would have stayed a few days. It's $6 to get in to the park, the Natural Entrance and Big Room are self guided tours and free. Guided tours range from $10-$20. My National Parks pass got me in free and I took the self guided tours.
The Natural Entrance is a huge cave entrance with a few bats flying around. Thousands of them hang out in the Bat Chamber, closed to the public, and come out at dusk. This apparently is a big deal as they have a big amphitheater for viewing the exodus. Switchbacks lead down and down for 750 feet into this huge cavern and a mile long trail. Huge boulders are the primary attraction here and this trail ends at rest rooms and some concessions.
The Big Room picks up from here. This is another mile long self guided trail. Tons of stalactites and stalagmites and other formations are everywhere, dangling from the ceiling, poking up from the floor and jutting out from the sides. These things have taken millions of years to form. This is a place to bring extra film.
I spent the afternoon driving to Dog Canyon. When I got there I decided I didn't like it much and left. Actually I guess I had a hot shower on my mind. There usually are none at national parks and monuments and I was in the Guadalupes almost two weeks. All I could do there was bathe out of a bucket. So I ended up at Brantley Lake State Park where I had a long, hot shower.
02/27/01:
Brantley Lake is a reservoir created by damming the Pecos River. As such, it's pretty average. I would have liked to get out just to stretch the muscles after a couple of weeks off the water. I had some chores to take care of so I didn't get out today.
02/28/01:
Today is one of the worst days I've experienced in the 1.5+ years I've been traveling. Temperature at 25 degrees, a ten knot wind blowing, rainy and dreary. A typical New England day. I picked up the mail I had forwarded and the last of the photographs being developed. This is a good day to head for a motel and update the web site and do my email.
03/01/01:
Spent the night in a motel in Carlsbad. I couldn't get a connection on my AT&T calling card and Carlsbad does not have a local number for MSN. Except for being in out of the cold, a wasted night.
03/02/01:
Drove up to Roswell, New Mexico where MSN has a local access number. Yeah, that Roswell, New Mexico; the one where the alien spaceship crashed in the 50's. The one where they recovered alien bodies but got hushed up by the military. It's still a big thing in Roswell. They have alien research centers, museums and many businesses play up the alien theme so it must be true, right?
Got the website updated and email done at a Roswell motel. Idle hands led me to download the new Internet Explorer update. It was down hill from there. It transferred the wrong telephone number to the new setup and then wouldn't let me change it. It doesn't show the number its dialing but I thought it was dialing too many numbers for a local number. Sure enough I racked up some long distance charges.
After screwing around with it for an hour or so I decided to uninstall it. That left me with a damaged IE that did nothing and gave me no opportunity to fix anything. I thought about it for a while and then decided to restore the entire system from the factory backup. I backed up my data and let it fly.\
The install went smoothly. The only problem was the Windows product key wasn't on the cover of the Windows Getting Started book like they claimed. Toshiba said that's Microsoft's area and to call them. They shut down 7pm Pacific time and it was now around 10pm Mountain time. So wait until morning.
At 8am Mountain time/7am Pacific time, I called again. The telephone menu led me to the section that told me to get the product key from the Windows Authentication Label on the laptop. Shit! Why couldn't the menu have led me to that last night? I didn't need to talk to a support person.
Finished loading the basic software and tried to get IE working. No dice. It kept leading me to a blank screen. Screwed around and loaded AOL and AT&T browsers and tried IE again. That must have shook it up because now the setup worked.
Decided I had to stay another night to complete everything. After installing FrontPage, my web site program, it decided everything on the web site was new and I had to upload 20+ megs. Several hours later everything was loaded again and working.
Of course this copy of IE destroyed my old email mechanism. I had tried to send out the Texas Trip Summary but it didn't go. So now I had to manually transfer my distribution list from Outlook to hotmail.com, one by one by one and hotmail response ain't good during prime time. Finally got it done, sent the report out and went to bed.
03/03/01:
After picking up a new copy of TurboTax to replace the one I couldn't find I was on the road again, heading for the Lincoln National Forest in Cloudcroft. Driving through the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation on the way I saw lots of ground snow in the nearby mountains and lots of casinos.
Nearing Cloudcroft I saw a sign saying steep grade, elevation rise 4100 feet in the next 16 miles. That should have told me to turn back but it didn't. Lots of ground snow led to snow on roofs and trees. That led to snowbanks 4-5 feet high and the whine of snowmobiles. Did I turn back? Not I! Not even when I saw signs to a ski area.
Cloudcroft topped out at 8650 feet. Beyond that the road continued to climb. The road to the campground I was looking for was closed as was the one to the next campground. I finally came to a turnoff to several other campgrounds. This road hadn't been plowed but lots of 4X4's had been through there leaving a road full of slush. No way was I going to take my 4 cylinder back there so I finally turned around. I suppose the elevation was over 9000 feet. I was having some difficulty catching my breath and my ears had been popping for the last 45 minutes.
My next alternative was a state park 75 miles away on the other side of Las Cruces. On the way I came to the White Sands Missile Range and the White Sands National Monument so I stopped in at the monument.
When I think of a monument I think of the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial or something like that. Out west here, they have national monuments of unique geological features; places to small to be a national park but ones they still want to be protected so they become national monuments.
What makes this place unique is the white gypsum sand dunes standing 10-15 feet high for miles between the Sacramento and San Andres (where they have the big fault line?) Mountains. The wind started blowing sand around at 20+mph so I stopped reading the roadside exhibits and going on the little short trails. They apparently have to plow the sand off the roads regularly because sand banks line the roads.
03/04/01:
Drove the 50 miles or so to Caballo Lake State Park in Caballo. Chose the primitive campsites right on the lake looking across to the Caballo Mountains on the other side of the lake, Little wind blowing and temperatures in the upper 60's. Forecast is for the same for tomorrow. Have some chores to do so will wait to paddle then.
03/05/01:
Sh..! The forecast was wrong. 10 knot wind blowing, skies are overcast and temperatures in the lower 40's.
03/08/01:
I'm back in the mountains again. I want to see the Gila Cliff Dwellings. It's a 44 mile, 2+ hours from Silver City up NM 15 to the cliffs. I passed a couple of camping areas on the way but they both had big mud holes and you had to pass through (not over) a creek. I was able to get in and out but thought if we had any more weather they might be a problem.
Rather than go all the way to the dwellings today I turned off towards Lake Roberts. One of the camping areas here was closed, one wanted a $7 fee and I finally found a spot at the last area which was free. The Continental Divide National Scenic Trail goes right through the camping area. The camping area is so big and has so many side roads I got lost.
03/09/01:
I made the 26 mile drive from Lake Roberts to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument in just over an hour. The temperature was in the low 20's but it warmed up pretty much by the time I got to the cliffs.
The Mogollon (muggy-own) people had lived in the area in the late 1200's. The cliff dwellings consist of seven caves 180 feet up in a cliff, five of which contain a total of 40 rooms. I spent an hour wandering around enjoying the sights. A large ledge sits in front of the caves and I could picture the Indians sitting out there doing there chores and whatever.
The cliffs are part of a gorge through which a small stream runs. The strema is the main reason they moved in. The caves are large and the Mogollon used flat stones and clay from the stream and the nearby Gila River to wall off the front of the caves and build the many rooms used for different purposes.