Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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The first bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, January 20, 2008
My primary card that was compromised the other day and I'm happy to say I was able to use an older credit card I haven't used for a while and it is still acceptable. There was no real reason to think it wouldn't be but you never know; these big banks make me uneasy. As reward I treated myself to a nice lunch at Nature's Pantry Nutrition Center, a cafe and natural foods store on New York Avenue.
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
The Heliograph in the Apache Wars
"The mountains and the sun...were made his allies, the eyes of his command, and the carriers of swift messages. By a system of heliograph signals, communications were sent with almost incredible swiftness; in one instance a message traveled seven hundred miles in four hours. The messages, flashed by mirrors from peak to peak of the mountains, disheartened the Indians as they crept stealthily or rode swiftly through the valleys, assuring them that all their arts and craft had not availed to conceal their trails, that troops were pursuing them and others awaiting them. The telescopes of the Signal Corps, who garrisoned the rudely built but impregnable works on the mountains, permitted no movement by day, no cloud of dust even in the valleys below to escape attention. Little wonder that the Indians thought that the powers of the unseen world were confederated against them."