Thursday, December 17, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
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Lava field dawn, Valley of Fires, Carrizozo NM, April 28, 2009
Back on Saturday, December 5, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM I mentioned New Mexico's plan to close the park system December 23rd and 24th this year as part of an employee furlough program the State put in place to help deal with their budgetary shortfall.
It's time to start drifting toward a solution to the problem of where to make my Night Camps those nights so tomorrow I'm going up to Valley of Fires Recreation Area, Carrizozo NM. From there I'll head west over to the Rio Grande valley and hopefully touch base with friends at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge and Elephant Butte State Park as I drift down the valley before making a blast over to Henderson NV to spend a few days with cousins Ken & Connie between Christmas and New Years.
Night camp
Site 42 - 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: