Sunday, January 20, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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A hike up to the first bench
One thing I'd like to do while I'm here is hike up the Dog Canyon Trail as far as the Fairchild Line Cabin 2.9 miles and 1500 ft in elevation above the trailhead at the campground. That's about the limit of what this dilapidated body wants to take on in its present condition. Today I got well up onto the first bench, a sort of ledge running along the south side of the canyon. I made it to the 1.25 mile marker and turned back. That was far enough to test my condition and it looks like I should be fit enough to make it up to the cabin and back without beating myself up too badly.
Today's journey: A mile and a quarter up the Dog Canyon Trail.
Night camp
Site 8 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.