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
Disaster and the Failure of Authority
Disasters are almost by definition about the failure of authority, in part because the powers that be are supposed to protect us from them, in part also because the thousand dispersed needs of a disaster overwhelm even the best governments, and because the government version of governing often arrives at the point of a gun. But the authorities don't usually fail so spectacularly. Failure at this level requires sustained effort. The deepening of the divide between the haves and have nots, the stripping away of social services, the defunding of the infrastructure, mean that this disaster—not of weather but of policy—has been more or less what was intended to happen, if not so starkly in plain sight.
The Uses of Disaster Rebecca Solnit, Harpers.org, September 9, 2005