Friday, March 25, 2011 - BLM Campground, El Malpais National Conservation Area, Grants NM
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10,000 Watts, BLM Campground, El Malpais National Conservation Area, Grants NM, March 25, 2011
What are they thinking
See that, up there under the ridge? That's an array of 48 photovoltaic panels, each rated at 220 watts. You think that might supply enough power to keep a camp host from wandering off to find a place to plug in an air conditioner? Bet it would.
Night camp
Site ? - BLM Campground, El Malpais National Conservation Area, Grants NM
- This is a new, small, quiet BLM campground with shelters and fire rings at each site and vault toilets - no water, power, or dump station available.
- Good Verizon cell phone service
- Good Verizon EVDO service
- Locate this campground on my Night Camps Map
- Go to BLM El Malpais National Conservation Area website
- Get a BLM 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: