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
Life is to be Lived, Not Controlled
No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me. I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. Hence again I have stayed in my hole, because up above there's an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern.
.... Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? - diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that were to happen. .....Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.