Saturday, February 9, 2008 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
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Line cabin from the Second Bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico, February 2, 2008
Remains of the Dog Canyon line cabin
See it? Down there? Under the evergreen on the left? Backed up against that big rock? Look closely. It's that small square of stone walls with an opening for a door. Maybe 8 feet square. It overlooks the small crick that flows down from the head of Dog Canyon in the defile maybe 50 feet in front of the cabin. My guess is this water source is available most of the year.
There's a view down through Dog Canyon all the way to the Tularosa Basin from that cabin. Neat.
What is a line cabin anyway and who built and used it?
Saturday is not a good day to change campgrounds
Kate & Terry like to move on Tuesdays after the weekenders have gone home and now I see why. When I finally rolled into Rockhound State Park outside Deming, New Mexico this afternoon there was but one lousy hookup site left and the one developed site (without hookups) left wasn't any better.
Not being a happy camper, I left thinking I'd go see if there were any spots left at Pancho Villa State Park, down by the border at Columbus, New Mexico. Pancho Villa is only 30 miles or so south of Deming and I can always hole up at the Wal-Mart in Deming if there's nothing at Pancho Villa. But luck was with me and there were a couple of the lesser sites left so I set up and bought 5 nights.
There's a lesson in here somewhere and I wonder if I've learned it. Probably not - it generally takes a bit of repetition to get my attention.
I may have to re-think this journal
As my faithful reader has surely noticed by now, I'm once again a week behind in my postings here. It's getting sort of obvious even to me that keeping this journal on a day to day basis simply isn't going to work - the rigidity of posting to a schedule just doesn't suit me. Especially so now that I don't have much scheduled rigidity left in my world these days. And I like that, thank you very much.
Or I may not re-think it - instead maybe I'll just plod along at this uneven gait for a while and let it evolve. And try to lighten up a bit about this self imposed structure business.
I do tend to go with the flow in a rigid sort of way don't I? Ha!
Whatever.....
Night camp
Site 29 - Pancho Villa State Park, Columbus NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to the Pancho Villa State Park website
- Locate Pancho Villa State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Listening
As the poet Gary Snyder said so well, "Beyond all this studying and managing and calculating, there's another level to nature. You can go about learning the names of things and doing inventories of trees, bushes, and flowers. But nature often just flits by and is not easily seen in a hard, clear light. Our actual experience of many birds and wildlife is chancy and quick. Wildlife is known as a call, a cough in the dark, a shadow in the shrubs. You can watch a cougar on a wildlife video for hours, but the real cougar shows herself only once or twice in a lifetime. One must be tuned to hints and nuances." After more than thirty years of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spending a great deal of that time out-of-doors, Snyder has seen the mountain lion on just a few occasions. One of these sightings was most unusual. Gary had been visiting a neighbor and was walking down from the nearby ridge to his home when he observed a cougar sitting near one of the windows of the house. The animal appeared to be listening intently as one of Snyder's stepdaughters practiced the piano.