Exploring NM

July 4, 2021

Howdy, folks!

Suddenly it's July and we're in the full swing of summer. We had a multi-week heat wave of 90F weather back in June and it's cooled off quite a bit since, with lots of days in just the 70Fs and 80Fs and then about twenty degrees cooler at night. The dogs are getting me up earlier and earlier to go out and it's not too hard to see outside at 5am right at the moment. I can then drag my feet and wait to take them for a run until 8pm or after and still be able to see just fine...it takes forever for the light to completely dim out here and next thing you know it's almost 9:30 at night! It's been a busy week on the ranch with everyone at the construction site concentrating their energies on getting ready for our final concrete pour, which we did on Friday. It took four trucks to get it done! We had three trucks for the first pour and two for the second. Not only were we staying late to get everything done in time, we were working around lots of thunderstorms and a few actual all-day rains. The days of the pours I had to go out to the main ranch road's gate and play policeman, letting all the concrete guys in and no one else. Before 6:30am it is always one of the concrete guys, but after that it could be anybody. I've even had people stop at the gate and tell me that they lost the code or can't remember it and want me to just let them in. There are half a dozen ranches here on over 8000 acres, all with different gate codes, and I don't know who's who. One guy told me that his family used to own the whole thing and he's back in town for the Fourth and he's just recovering from getting shot in a drive-by and that's why he has lost 50 pounds...I don't need this at 7am on a Friday morning! Now, I'm not bashful and I'm no coward, but I also don't see a need to make Erin a widow while guarding someone else's property, so, when the next cement truck came a few minutes later I just opened the gate and looked the other way. He was more than a little squirrelly and was back out at the gate less than five minutes later(the ranch road is over 20 miles long!), so who knows what he was up to...just another day on Civilian Gate Patrol!

We took an amazing little road trip yesterday up north of us and then east out into the plains to a river canyon. We headed up to Springer, which is about an hour north of Las Vegas on the interstate, and then turned east and took a newly paved two-lane about 25 miles east of there, towards Texas, with nothing but Texas plates bustling back and forth, passing us like we were standing still. At times the plains were flat, with old volcanoes towering to the north and the Rockies looming behind us, but at other times there were big bluffs, folds in the land, small cliffs, groves of trees and everything was rolling and super green! We're greener in San Jose than it is in Santa Fe, but where we went yesterday made San Jose look like the desert. We turned off at Abbott and headed south on a much more desolate road towards Mills, at which point we took a dirt road back to the west for nine miles to head into the Canadian River Canyon. The Canadian River starts in the Rockies above Cimarron before cutting southeast across the plains of eastern New Mexico, then turning east cutting across the northern tip of Texas above Amarillo and then running through Oklahoma City before joining the Arkansas River just above Forth Smith, AR, hitting Little Rock and then the Mississippi. You wouldn't think that a river canyon could cut through the plains and have such high cliffs looming over it, but, guess what, it can! This area was gorgeous and we drove into the Kiowa National Grassland to get down to the river itself. Up on top, you could see forever in all directions over the undulating plains and the Rockies looming far to the west, but then the cliffs themselves hung almost 1000' feet over the river. What a find! And, what a potential future place to live! We are constantly searching for a future area to relocate to after we spend a few years down here, but is it better to be up in the mountains with less water and more fire danger or out in the plains with much more water but also much worse weather...decisions, decisions, decisions. Do we try to get one elk a year for the freezer or a bunch of little pronghorns? To make it even a better day, on top of all of that, we met a kindred spirit from Amarillo who was out car camping for the weekend in a regular-looking mini-van that was super powered with a solar panel that powered a big battery and a refrigerator, among other things. She, too, is intoxicated with New Mexico and has very similar ideas for the future to buy a little piece of land and then start building everything on site from scratch. Even better, she does pet portraits and writes novels, so we talked with her for a couple of hours and it really made both of our days just to randomly meet her out in the middle of nowhere, in front of the Grassland's welcome billboard filled with maps, rules and notices. We stopped there to finally eat our Mexican takeout that we had gotten about an hour earlier before driving down into the canyon and then she pulled right up next to us to see what we were reading on the bulletin board. What a small world it is! Truly, we had a gem of a day and are now thinking of finding a reason to run in to Amarillo and meet her some day! This would give us another big city option to go to besides Albuquerque(550,000 people/100 miles away) and Denver(600,000 people/350 miles away), with Amarillo having about 200,000 people and being 250 miles away.

Now, for the best part of the email, I have a whole new batch of pictures ready. First, an altered photograph that I took of a sunset one night that I played around with on the computer. The next seven shots are from the Kiowa National Grassland and the Canadian River Canyon: first the road south from Abbott to Mills; then two shots looking west from the billboard that we stopped at; next is a windmill that we drove by on the way in and snapped a shot of on the way out...left right where it was in the middle of the road; then, I turned around and took a shot back down the road towards the canyon with the Rockies far in the distance; lastly, two shots of the Canadian River Canyon, looking south as it meanders its way from the Rockies to the Mississippi(first you can step over it easily where I-25 crosses it in northern New Mexico, then it's the size of a creek back in Pennsylvania when it goes through the canyon, and then it finally balloons up into massive size and is dammed up in many places to make huge lakes in Texas, Oklahoma & Arkansas). The next shot is looking down on San Jose at dawn as you cold still see all the outside lights on while I was doing my guard duty at the ranch gate. Then, a shot of a rainbow from the new house with all the sawbucks in the foreground and an illuminated Starvation Peak in the distance. Next, a series of four shots of a particularly colorful sunset last week from the driveway, the new house and the big field across the driveway. Then, my two old diesels posing for a calendar shot once they finally made it out here earlier this week...we had to push the yellow one off of the truck and then switch out batteries just to get it back to the ranch, but we got it done! And, finally, a shot of Willow cowering in her thunderstorm shelter earlier this afternoon as the thunder was making her really uncomfortable...she'll go under the car, if outside, and try to crawl behind the toilet, if inside. I headed her off at the pass and shut the bathroom door before she could make it in there and then flipped another dog bed on top of her with plenty of blankets and that seemed to help her feel just a little bit more secure. Now, we just need to get through another night of all the locals shooting off their fireworks!

Take care,