Sunday, December 5, 2010 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Tularosa Basin from Second Bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, December 5, 2010
Take a hike
Today was a beautiful, warm, mostly sunny, day and I got a hankering to hike the 3 miles up to the line cabin on the Dog Canyon Trail. It's a nice hike and it's been a couple years since I was last up there and I wanted to make the hike before I head over to Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM for a while.
So off I went.
That picture up there is looking back down canyon at the Tularosa Basin from the Second Bench about 2-/2 miles in and 1,500 feet up from the campground {I stuck a pin in my Night Camps map}. Phew - I'm not used to this!
Night camp
Site 7 - 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."