Wednesday, January 16, 2008 - Bottomless Lakes State Park, Roswell NM
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Thump, thump, thump
All day, all night, thump, thump, thump. Sounds like an old 2 cylinder John Deere tractor idling off in the distance. What could it be? Nobody runs those things full time. Certainly not out here in the desert. I'll find out - when I leave the park I'll head toward the thump and see if I can find the source. And find it I did, a couple of miles east of the park - a large two cylinder pumping engine; pumping what I'm going to guess is natural gas and I'm also going to guess it's running on the gas it's pumping. But then what's in those storage tanks? Crude?
Heading out
Farther west, eventually, but to get there I have to get around the mountins just west of Carlsbad. That means either a run around the south end through El Paso, TX or heading north to Artesia or Roswell, NM and from there head over the mountains to Alamogordo, NM. I'm choosing the later, mainly to stay avoid driving the interstates around El Paso. First stop: Bottomless Lakes State Park, Roswell, New Mexico, at least for the night.
Today's journey: US 285 north from Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad, New Mexico to Roswell, New Mexico then US 380 east to Bottomless Lakes State Park
Night camp
Bottomless Lakes State Park, Roswell NM
- Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming and the signal is weak
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and I've found service very slow.
- Go to Bottomless Lakes State Park website
- Locate to Bottomless Lakes State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
A Siberian dog signal-howl
A camp in the middle of a clear, dark winter's night presents a strange, wild appearance. I was awakened, soon after midnight, by cold feet, and, raising myself upon one elbow, I pushed my head out of my frosty fur bag to see by the stars what time it was. The fire had died away to a red heap of smouldering embers. There was just light enough to distinguish the dark outlines of the loaded sledges, the fur-clad forms of our men, lying here and there in groups about the fire, and the frosty dogs, curled up into a hundred little hairy balls upon the snow. Away beyond the limits of the camp stretched the desolate steppe in a series of long snowy undulations, which blended gradually into one great white frozen ocean, and were lost in the distance and darkness of night. High overhead, in a sky which was almost black, sparkled the bright constellations of Orion and the Pleiades--the celestial clocks which marked the long, weary hours between sunrise and sunset. The blue mysterious streamers of the aurora trembled in the north, now shooting up in clear bright lines to the zenith, then waving back and forth in great majestic curves over the silent camp, as if warning back the adventurous traveller from the unknown regions around the Pole. The silence was profound, oppressive. Nothing but the pulsating of the blood in my ears, and the heavy breathing of the sleeping men at my feet, broke the universal lull. Suddenly there rose upon the still night air a long, faint, wailing cry like that of a human being in the last extremity of suffering. Gradually it swelled and deepened until it seemed to fill the whole atmosphere with its volume of mournful sound, dying away at last into a low, despairing moan. It was the signal-howl of a Siberian dog; but so wild and unearthly did it seem in the stillness of the arctic midnight, that it sent the startled blood bounding through my veins to my very finger-ends. In a moment the mournful cry was taken up by another dog, upon a higher key--two or three more joined in, then ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, until the whole pack of a hundred dogs howled one infernal chorus together, making the air fairly tremble with sound, as if from the heavy bass of a great organ. For fully a minute heaven and earth seemed to be filled with yelling, shrieking fiends. Then one by one they began gradually to drop off, the unearthly tumult grew momentarily fainter and fainter, until at last it ended as it began, in one long, inexpressibly melancholy wail, and all was still.