Monday, November 30, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
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Google map of the TX border at Hobbs NM, screen shot November 30, 2009
After being startled on an earlier trip through the west to discover you can sometimes actually see the Texas/New Mexico border on the ground I've been watching for it ever since. The first time I saw it was farther south of here, I forget where exactly but you could distinctly see the different vegetative growth across a fence that ran along the border. The Texas side was scrabbly over grazed mesquite scrub land - across the fence was typical New Mexico desert. I saw the border again today as I crossed out of the irrigated industrial cotton and peanut farms on the east and into the southwestern desert at Hobbs, New Mexico to the west. It's amazing how deeply the cultural differences get etched into the landscape. This is no natural boundary - it's a line drawn on a map now etched into the soil.
My luck may be changing
It's really too soon to tell but things may be looking up. I'm not alone with my problems - Tioga George, a widely followed blogging full-timer I draw inspiration from, has been going through one of these rough spots with his rig too, where things go awry one after the other. Let's hope things will settle down for us both for a while.
After making a fingers-crossed beeline all the way from New York to have Charlie at Charlie's Transmission in Carlsbad NM look at my worn transmission tailshaft bushing before it croaks I stopped by his shop when I got to town this morning. It turns out what I had interpreted as excessive wear in my obsessing over my longstanding driveshaft issues is completely normal - there is nothing amiss. What a relief. Charlie took good care of me last New Years when the tranny blew a seal and I wanted to get his advise on who to see about my tire bounce problem too. He sent me off to see Ruben at Forrest Tire down the street, a shop I had already identified on Google as a likely candidate. Their website shows an alignment machine in a pit, just what I'm looking for. - the usual car alignment machines are too small for LD and a lot of the truck machines are too big. Alas, some time after that picture was taken they pulled that machine, filled the pit, and stuck in a more profitable car alignment machine on a lift. Too small, Goldilocks, too small. They can't align LD but they can give it a good long look at the problem for me. That's the first step to a cure anyway so tomorrow morning after it warms up a bit (they will be working outside) they will have a go at it.
Night camp
Site 37 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
- Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies with many drop-outs.
- See a list of the nights I've camped at Brantley Lake State Park
- Locate Brantley Lake State Park on my Night Camps map
- Go to Brantley Lake State Park website
- Locate services on my Resources 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: