Friday, December 2, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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White-crowned Sparrow, San Antonio NM, April 11, 2010
No hookups
It's cold enough this weekend that I need to run a couple electric heaters at night to be comfortable. The reserved sites with electric hookups are reserved for the next couple of nights and the unreserved sites are occupied here at Leasburg Dam State Park so off I go again, this time to Deming where there are three State Parks and several private RV parks to choose from. I chose the Low-HI RV Ranch where I stayed a while last December. There is a major cold snap rolling in with lows forecast in the mid teens and I really wanted to be sure I nabbed a site with electric hookups before it hits. Done. Let 'er rip.
Sheesh, what is it this time?
Before pulling out of Leasburg Dam State Park this morning I checked the oil. That done I closed the hood. It didn't latch. Closed again. It didn't latch. Slammed it. It didn't latch. Huh? Turns out the cross bar in the hood that the latch grabs has gone missing. Really. Can you buy those? How does it attach? Sheesh.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
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: