Monday, February 4, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM

Walking the Second Bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, February 2, 2008

Aarrg... iPhoto renumbered my images

On my hike up Dog Canyon Trail Saturday I took way too many pictures and when I downloaded them to the laptop iPhoto ran out of hard drive space about 3/4 of the way through and I had to remove some old files to make more space on the drive. When I resumed the download, iPhoto started from scratch and downloaded ALL the images again and, of course, ran out of hard drive space again. Geeze, Louise, who wrote this thing? I removed some more stuff and started over. This time iPhoto completed the download, but renumbered the images. So now I have duplicates of most of the images with different numbering sequences. Go figger! I can tediously recover from this but I think it's time to abandon iPhoto before I lose something in the process.

I'm going to set up an archiving system but first I need to research how photo archiving is normally done before I paint myself in a corner as I'm so prone to do.

Just what I need, another project.

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

Wind on the Gangplank

There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."

Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind." His mother, in her 1905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin:

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