Day 98 September 24

Look at today's travel stops at this link.

Today's Map

We are on an eastern track now, headed home to Sweet Virginia.

Leaving The Great Salt Plains for Now

Away from the Great Salt Plains State Park and the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, a starkly beautiful place. We head out on section roads to intersect with 132 then 60 east into Pond Creek, OK (population 896) on the banks of the Salt Fork Arkansas River. Here a hungry traveler can visit the ever so popular ‘Greasy Steve’s’ eatery, where the motto is “It Ain’t Easy Being Greasy.”

Wednesdays; Grilled, Crispy Shrimp.

Thursdays; Chicken Fried Steak.

Fridays; All You Can Eat Calf Fries.

Saturdays; All You Can Eat Cat Fish.

Sundays; ‘Closed for Recovery’.

Friday’s menu begs the question, “What the hell is a calf fry?”

Well.....

In the Panhandle, some folks own a lot of cattle. Cattle, cattle, cattle. The reason for owning a lot of cattle in this country is primarily to make a lot of money. What better way to do that than to raise big, fat, happy, four-legged, grass chomping bovines and get them to market as quickly as possible, so the world will have plenty of Big Macs.

And how does one make a big, fat, happy, four-legged grass chomping bovine? You give it lots of water, grass, antibiotics, growth stimulating chemicals, hormones, pesticides, mineral salt licks AND you cut off its balls!

No testicles mean no testosterone, which is a game changer if you are a young calf or any other self-respecting male mammal, once your balls are gone, that is.

Those ball-less babies quickly morph into big, fat, content, lazy, easy to manage, money on the hoof eating machines, with only vague memories of those testosterone influenced days, perfectly happy someday to walk the plank at the nearest slaughter house.

No more having to worry about those young, cute, nubile heifers sashaying about in the pasture. No, all you must do now is laze the days away stuffing yourself with that sweet, irrigation-raised, imported grass; piling on the pounds and doing your part to elevate human cholesterol levels to historic highs so big pharma can sell more lipid-lowering statins. Ain’t economy grand?

Big Oklahoma Grass Country

Shifting from the subject of balls for a moment, as it relates to cows and all, let’s not even talk about the embarrassing low efficiency of supplying protein to the world in this way, which requires 28 times more land, 6 times more fertilizer and 11 times more water than producing protein from pork or chicken. Not that raising industrial pork or chicken is much better but it’s certainly better than cattle, which deliver up to five times more greenhouse gas emissions.

Imagine all those cow farts. I wonder, in my darkest moments, how many times a cow farts in an average cow day.  Enough apparently to ensure that, combined with all other farting cows, it accounts for a fifth of world greenhouse gas emissions.

And, big alert, that analysis does not consider the immense amount of vile, noxious and wonderfully satisfying human farting that goes on from eating all that delicious steak, barbeque, spare ribs, beef stew, chuck roast and the occasional Big Mac, Whopper, Baconator, Whataburger, Fatburger, Quarter Pounder or Super Burger. While farting is gratifying and downright funny, it only adds to the emissions problem.

Rolling Hills of the Oklahoma Plains

Now back to balls. Each year in America, well-meaning guys wearing big hats slaughter about 20 million steers. That amounts to 40 million testicles. What does one to do with all those balls? Well the answer is obvious. You ship them out to fine restaurants like Greasy Steve’s and others in the great state of Oklahoma, where very happy people descended from hardy pioneers prepare your basic batter-coated, deep-fried calf balls, which look vaguely like corn fritters or fried oysters; thus, another name for this delicacy, the ‘mountain oyster’. Never mind that the largest mountain in the Panhandle region is a spoiled cheese midden at the Hilmar Cheese Company in Dalhart, TX.

Disposing of forty million deep fried calf balls requires entrepreneurship. How does one get rid of THAT many balls?  Well, if you are a restauranteur you ply your patrons with beer and whiskey, then you spring local, artisan, batter-coated, Panhandle calf fries on them, recommend a touch more whiskey to keep their enthusiasm up, remind them that Fridays are “all the calf fries you can eat nights”, announce plans for your next “calf fry eating contest” and, with a  final flourish, announce that the bar is still open.

And that is what they do in Oklahoma for fun, besides lots of other cool stuff. What are you gonna do with folks who run outside to watch tornadoes when the siren goes off, who schedule their lives around football games and who have declared the watermelon to be their state vegetable.

In fact, the good folks in Vinita, OK (population 6,000) sponsor an annual ‘calf ball cook out’. Well, they don’t call it precisely that. Area teams (last year 17) vie for the title of “best calf fry”. Organizers, recognizing that participants hyped up on tequila, cholesterol, marijuana, microbrews and calf fries need lots of stimulation, also offer games, turtle and stick horse races, a hula hoop contest, an inflatable obstacle course shaped live a bull and a car bash; “how much damage you can cause” by hitting a car with a mallet.

Then there’s club owner Hank Moore in Stillwater who hosts the annual “Testicle Festival’ at his club the Tumbleweed, at which 20,000 of the Panhandle’s most seasoned partiers drop in, tanked up on tequila and God only knows what else and proceed to eat and drink their way through more than 10,000 pounds of calf balls! Never mind that the club is named after an invasive Russian thistle.

A few recent heartfelt testimonials about the “Testicle Festival” will bring tears to your eyes:

"There's nothin' we do better than drinkin', dancin' and diggin' in!! See ya at the Fry!!", Lacie, Oklahoma City

"I have already started drinking and can hardly wait!!!", Bryson, Marlow

"HOT WOMEN AND COLD BEER YOU GOTTA LOVE IT THANK YOU STILLWATER", Frankie, St. Louis

You can tell by these testimonials that the “Testicle Festival” attracts a  rather sophisticated crowd.

Not to be out done, Steve of ‘Greasy Steve’s offers his own calf fry eating contests and boasts that the best of the best, darn, ball eaters in Oklahoma come from Pond Creek. In fact, just last year, Mr. Ernest Colburn from Pond Creek established a new calf fry eating record when he inhaled three hundred and forty-six quivering, battered-coated calf balls in twenty minutes.

Ernest is the guy walking around town looking like a human shag carpet. Let that be a lesson to you. That’s what happens when you eat a bunch of testosterone laced calf balls.

I raise my glass to the people of the Panhandle. “Congratulations to you for solving the vexing problem of how to get rid of all those calf balls. May your communities prosper, and may YOUR balls always remain attached”.

We travel through Lamont (population 417), Tonkawa (population 3,216), named after a Tonkawa tribe of the Nez Perce and finally into Ponca City (population 25,387), named after another Nez Perce tribe. A great tribute to name your city after the Indian tribe from whom you stole it.

Ponca City, Oklahoma, the home of an imposing and brilliantly created 17 foot tall bronze figure of "The Pioneer Woman". The sculptor depicts her clutching a bible in one hand and holding on to her son with the other. She says, "I see no boundaries". I've known a few Oklahoma women. They are a force of nature. 

I See No Boundaries

Dust storms kick up around Tonkawa.

From Ponca City we cross the Arkansas River winding its way to confluence with the mighty Mississippi. East on route 60 into the Osage Indian Reservation, through McCord (population 1440), Burbank (population 141) and finally we pull into Pawhuska (population 3,477), named after Osage chief, Paw-Hiu-Skah, which means "White Hair" in English. The Osage tribal government center is here.

Pawhuska is also our staging area for a visit to the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the largest (39,650 acres) protected remnant of tallgrass prairie left on earth. Just to give some perspective consider that, before the Anglo invasion, tall grass prairie covered portions of fourteen states. Now less than four percent of this magnificent American landscape exist, and that only in scattered fragments. This preserve is one of those fragments. 

Eating Machines

Thank goodness for the Nature Conservancy, which not only successfully negotiated complicated land deals to protect this place, but also worked with many partners to restore it to some resemblance of a functioning tallgrass prairie ecosystem, using 2,500 free-ranging American bison as mowing machines and precisely prescribed burning to encourage growth of the grasses. And the bison work for free.

Big Old Bull

The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve is for us a favorite place on the American landscape. Immense, open country where one can breathe deep. Nothing captures the attention quite like five hundred or a thousand American bison moving as one across open prairie; the bulls grunting confidently along, sometimes suddenly breaking into a boisterous and short-lived trot, the cows in loose groups ambling along, knowingly in charge, keeping a close eye on cavorting calves, who shake and buck and juke and jive their way along. A perfect prairie community.

We come to rest this night at the Osage Hills State Park. Another hidden gem of the American landscape. We camp all by ourselves in our favorite section, on our favorite spot on a hill top with oak trees protecting us from the relentless sun. Soon another camper arrives, destined to be the only other person here for the night.

Turns out that person is a friendly and obviously independent lady celebrating her 84th birthday this very day. And what better way to celebrate than to put your faithful cat companion in the front seat, hop in the big red pickup truck loaded with your necessaries, favorite things and a comfortable built in bed, go to your favorite campsite and break out the cheap box wine. Good on her.

Our campsite is great. Good water and cover and a bathhouse with his and her showers, which I visited upon arrival, being that I really needed a shower. I returned to the campsite to report to Emily that, lucky for us nature lovers, the shower house came with complementary scorpions.

I don’t think she appreciated that amenity and, as I recall, did not visit the showers.

Turns out Oklahoma has but one species of scorpion prowling about its countryside, and this is the striped centroides which can get to be about 2.5 inches long. The ones I saw were less that an inch long. Scary little devils.

Scorpions, of course, are spiders.  In addition to other attractive features they have a tail with a poison duct and stinger at the tip. I sure wish I had a tail with a poison stinger for those chance encounters with rude people, none of whom live in Oklahoma, except for a few politicians.

We pass a restful evening and night at Osage. The next morning away we go, headed ever eastward, ever homeward.

So long Oklahoma.

And I haven’t eaten in my first calf ball....yet!

Day 97. September 23

Click the link for a map

See The Map

The Talleys wake up in Dalhart Texas. Not good!

We say goodbye to the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner and head northeast on route 54, straight as an arrow all the way to Guymon, OK.

We pass through Stratford, Tx (population 1,525) and Texhoma, TX (population 324) and Texhoma, OK (population 924), respectively sitting on opposite sides of the Texas Oklahoma border.

And finally, we sail into Guymon, the ‘Queen City of the Panhandle’, where one can visit the city’s largest employer, Seaboard Pork, a processing plant that double shifts it way through the slaughter of 18,000 hogs a day. Keep that white meat coming. Yum! Yum! Barbecue on the table.

These little towns and hamlets through which we pass today pepper the Panhandle and each has at least one mega-sized grain elevator, an elementary, middle and high school, a tractor supply, ten churches (Sunday attendance required), a meth lab in an abandoned 7-11, a town park and a ‘Cattleman’s Café”. Not much happening. Not much traffic coming and going.

This is the Great Plains. Oklahoma sits astride the 100th meridian, which means annual precipitation west of that line is sparse and increases as one travels to the eastern part of the state. The Panhandle is west of the line. It floats atop the Ogallala Aquifer. And guess where the irrigation water comes from for that hog processing plant. That’s right, the Ogallala aquifer. More draw down. Very little put back.

Farming is king in this country. Feedlots, corporate pork farms, dry land wheat, dairy and irrigated crops dominate the economy, all water intensive land uses.  Natural gas wells dot the landscape, with wind energy production and transmission in recent years diversifying landowners' farms.

Next is Hooker, OK (population 1,900). Its town motto says, "It's a Location, Not a Vocation". In Hooker we pick up route 64 due east and pass through Turpin (population 467), Forgan (population 547), Knowles (population 11), Gate (population 93), Rosston (population 31) and Buffalo (population 1,300).

Ten miles east of Buffalo we cross the Cimarron River which takes me back to 1958 and fond memories of Cimarron City, a television series I rarely missed, in which Mayor Matt Rockford teams up with the town’s blacksmith and deputy sheriff to thwart bad guys. The intrepid Dan Blocker plays Tiny Carl Budinger, one of Rockford’s ranch hands, until he and his dad, Ben Cartwright, bought a ranch, named it Bonanza and got their own show.

The Cimarron River flows for 700 miles from its starting point in southeastern Colorado through a silver of northeastern New Mexico, into Oklahoma, then Kansas, back into Oklahoma and on to Tulsa where it joins the Arkansas River.

It enters Oklahoma near Kenton (population 17) where an intrepid traveler can take a dirt, gravel road and drive for a hundred miles down the spectacular and secluded river valley, ringed with dry buttes and mesas. The river itself runs dry for most of this way. Emily and I visited here on another trip. Highly recommended for the adventurous traveler.

The use of the Cimarron for irrigation illustrates a niggling problem one encounters throughout the Great Plains. Cimarron water quality rates as poor because the river flows through natural mineral deposits, salt plains, and saline springs. Guess what happens when farmers use that water for crops. The irrigated water dissolves more salt that naturally occurs in the poor soil in this region and that water finds its way either back into the river or into the aquafer where it cyclically and incrementally increases the salt content. At some point the soils become too salty to farm.

If one looks at a google map of this region, besides the crop circles on irrigated land, one will see that the landscape divides into one square mile parcels, exactly 640 acres, each exactly a square. Over time folks scraped out perimeter roads around the parcels so they could get farm machinery in.

So instead of driving around in circles in this country to get lost you can drive around in squares. People buy and sell land here by the 640-acre parcel. That has its origin in the 1862 Homestead Act which led to the settlement of the West. Any American could claim as much as 160 acres of federal land, one square mile. And all that country was federal land because we took it from the Native Americans. Pretty good deal for us. Not so much for the Indians.

Eventually strong, brave pioneers, fooled into believing that if they just went west and plowed the land it would rain, settled on 420,000 square miles in all pursuant to the Homestead Act, all nicely parceled off.

Boy they were surprised, I bet, when they discovered that plowing the land does not  necessarily bring rain. Then somebody discovered the Ogallala Aquifer, and everything was cool and wet after that.

We pass through Tegarden (population 0) and Alva (population 4,595), home of the Northwestern Oklahoma State University Rangers.

On to Ingersoll (population 2 ghosts) and finally we cross the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River that feeds the Great Salt Plains Lake, part of the Great Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge.

The Salt Fork River 

A hidden gem this place is. Of course, the lake should not be here. It owes its existence to a dam on the Salt Fork. The lake spills out onto a vast salt flat put there over geologic time by the Salt Fork and other tributaries. 

The Great Salt Plain

The salt flats of this refuge provide nesting site for endangered interior least terns, threatened western snowy plovers and American avocets and a migration rest area for hundreds of thousands of shorebirds and waterfowl during spring, summer, and fall.

Many birds come to feed on larval and adult salt brine flies, a curious animal that has a special organ that removes excess salt from their bodies. Any self-respecting fly that is going to live here needs one of those.

That Water Is Really Salty

During the winter four and a half foot tall, endangered whooping cranes show up and, in the fall, one can see them foraging in local farm fields with sand hill cranes. Large flocks of migrating American white pelicans come to feed on lake fish.

A Squadron of American White Pelicans. See the Blue Heron in the Foreground.

The American White Pelican, a ponderously spectacular bird with a nine-foot wingspan, bigger that its cousin the Brown Pelican that we have on the east coast.   

Many other birds frequent the refuge including mallards, northern pintails, wood ducks, redheads, American widgeons, common mergansers, great blue herons, great egrets and white-faced ibis’.

Loner American White Pelican

American White Pelicans on the Dam Spillway

My Pretty Pelican Headed for the Lake

Refuges like this one are essential for the birds and beasts we have left in America. Now than parking lots, housing developments, industrial agricultural enterprises, artisan breweries, road houses, skyscrapers, airports, military bases, drive through Starbucks, shopping malls, football stadiums and thousands of dams have wiped out so much wild life habitat these ‘islands’ are critically important.

Good Habitat for us too where we find an excellent camp site for the night in the Great Salt Plains State Park.

Good night all. 

Day 96 September 22

Good morning ya'll. Click on this link to see where we were today.

Day 96 September 22 Map of Places Traveled.

 

Leaving the Valley of Fires

Left the magnificent Valley of Fires this morning and headed back to Carrizozo. We take route 54 N. through Robsart (population 6 ghosts), Coyote (population 10 ghosts), Gallinas (population 12 ghosts), Corona (population 165 live people). In Corona a couple of Mescalero Apaches said they were dead, but you know, you can’t believe a thing those Apaches say.  We go through Duran (population 35), Vaughn (population 446), Pastura (population 23) and finally pull into Santa Rosa (population 2,850) where we have a tolerable meal at Joseph’s Bar and Grill.

This is not much of a picture day.

Away we go to Cuervo (population 10 ghosts), Montoya (population 8 ghosts and 3 living souls) and finally into Tucumcari (population 5,365 living people, 12 ghosts and 100 Little Feat fans, which are not necessarily living people). 

I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty don't ya know, and I'm still, oh I'm still willin’
Out on the road late at night, I seen my pretty Alice in every head light
Alice, Dallas Alice

I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Now I driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin'

Now I smuggled some smokes and folks from Mexico
baked by the sun, every time I go to Mexico, and I'm still willin’
And I've been kicked be the wind, robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in and I'm still on my feet and I'm willin', oh I'm willin'

And I been from Tuscon to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me: weed, whites, and wine
and then you show me a sign
I'll be willin', to be movin' 

On to Logan (population 1,100) and Nara Vista (population 112 including a few stoned Little Feat fans) 

We came to a fork in the road, so we took it and rode through Amistad (population 40 ghosts) where in 1906, Henry S. Wannamaker, a lonely Congregational minister, put adds in church newspapers back east to encourage nubile farm girls to homestead near him. To his dismay, very few nubile farm girls responded, but forty ministers did, and they headed west to escape disillusioned parishioners back east. If you needed to hear a sermon in 1915 this would have been the place to be. To this day, Little Feat fans avoid Amistad like the plague, terrified of dead ministers.

On to Stead (population 0) and then Clayton (population 3,000) where we gas up and buy whiskey, which is lucky for me, because, as the next few hours unfold, it becomes apparent that we are going to need it, lots of it.

We head for the Rita Blanca National Grassland and the town of Felt, OK (population 93). Yes, that’s Oklahoma. Our run through New Mexico is over. The Forest Service maintains a campground of sorts in Felt where wayward travelers like us have been known to pull in to catch a night’s sleep. We arrive in Felt tired and hungry. Nobody else at the campground and nobody else in Felt either. Emily decides to check out the restrooms and comes back with a horrified look on her face. “Let’s get out of here”, she cried. “The floor of the outhouse and the commode cover is covered in blood”. Arriving at a campground and finding the facilities bloodied is not good. We left out quickly. Never saw another person around town. This is the only time on our entire trip we had serious misgivings about staying in a place. 

In our travels this summer we visited regions in the Great Plains and Midwest that used to have extensive short and tall grassland prairies, each sporting unique flora and fauna.   Short grass prairies, with blue grama and buffalo grass as dominant species, once covered most of the Great Plains, from the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains and as far east as Nebraska and north into Saskatchewan and large parts of Alberta, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas and the high plains of Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Lots of hot, dry country. Now existing short grass prairies are a mere shadow of their former selves, isolated remnants, islands in a vast dry sea given over to modern industrial agriculture. 

Tallgrass prairie covered much of the Midwest; grasses like big bluestem, switch grass and Indian grass dominate here. These grasses can grow up to ten feet tall. Long roots, reaching as much as twelve feet deep, allows them to drink long and deep from subterranean water sources. Today less than one percent of those stands exist in America.

Before Anglo influence, somewhere between thirty and sixty million American Bison freely roamed throughout these prairie grass regions. The impact of that many bison on the landscape must have been enormous, but the bison evolved here, along with the landscape and its unique ecology. That co-evolution built in ‘prairie recovery time’. When the bison got a little too overzealous and chowed down too severely in a given place they moved on. Grazing and recovery were cyclic.

By 1884, after a few decades of Anglo influence, there were three hundred American bison left in America. THREE HUNDRED. In recent years dedicated natural resource managers partnered with farmers, conservation groups, various government agencies and nonprofits to increase their numbers. Thanks to them today there are about five hundred thousand American bison in North America, confined to certain national and state parks, private lands and a few preserves. No longer do the bison freely roam.

Cattlemen quickly replaced bison with cattle that they drove in the 1867s and 1870s from Texas to Kansas in massive herds. In America in the period from 1991 until 2016 there were between 87 and 105 million head of cattle. Those on the Great Plains and in the Midwest approximate the number of bison originally roaming free. But the cattle cause way more damage to the landscape. Cattle overgrazing removes many other prairie plants like prairie violet, pale purple coneflower, false sunflower, lead plant, white prairie clover, showy tick trefoil, prairie blazing star, round-headed bush clover, stiff goldenrod, heath aster, and countless others do as well. The nature of overgrazing means no recovery time for the grasslands.

Perpetually overgrazed lands exist in a state of perpetual ecologic decline. As the native grasses die out, shallow rooted plants like mesquite (not a native plant), thorny weeds, Russian thistle (tumbleweed) and other non-natives replace the native grasses. These plants do not hold the fragile soil in place like the native grasses. 

The overall affect is a degradation of habitat for birds, amphibians, reptiles, other mammals, insects, spiders and Little Feat fans. 

Settlers intent on farming started irrigating these regions, first by sinking wells then by building dams, canals and aqueducts to deliver water to the thirsty land. They plowed and cultivated large land tracts on which to grow all manner of water hungry crop plants. These days, from an airplane flying over the Midwest and Great Plains, one can see bands of thousands of perfect, 133-acre, green circles packed together on irrigated lands, growing corn, alfalfa, sorghum, wheat and cotton, lots of cotton. That’s one problem.

Because its more efficient to producing marketable beef quicker, cattle growers now confine their livestock in CAFOs (confined Animal Feeding Operations), ‘feed lots’ by another name. Some are as big as ten football stadiums, and often hold a hundred thousand animals or more. Driving by one of these behemoths insults all five senses. And when an infrequent, but severe Midwest summer thunder storm drops five inches of rain on one, it creates a molasses-thick, fetid runoff that would choke a maggot. That’s another problem.   

The hidden cost of a Big Mac.

The one hundred thousand-acre Rita Blanca National Grassland is a federally designated entity in Oklahoma and Texas. ‘National Grassland’ has a nice ring to it, but it a grassland in name only, like others we saw on this trip.  Today ‘grasslands’ are amalgams, patch works of private and public land, mostly private, on which farmers do large scale cattle and dry land and irrigated crop farming. If one looks hard enough one can find small natural grassland remnants and restored areas interspersed among the private holdings. That’s where the coyotes and dead Little Feat fans hang out.  

Speaking of irrigation, now we are driving through the featureless Rita Blanca, smack on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest aquifers in the world, under 174,000 square miles of flat, treeless, hot, dry land in the Great Plains. It is a shallow aquifer, shallow meaning the water is easy to get. At one time it contained lots of water, mostly ‘fossil water’ from several Ice Ages of glacial runoff. Now sparse and paltry annual precipitation is the only recharge mechanism, which amounts to about a half inch gain in water depth a year.

Early settlers reached into it with windmill driver pumps.  No big deal. With the advent of the centrifugal pump people could do a hell of a lot more pumping. In short order, people put in thousands of wells throughout the Great Plains and begin drawing the water table down to support agricultural enterprises. Each year in the past two decades draw down rates increase dramatically in the region. Experts say at current withdrawal rates the Ogallala Aquifer might be dry by 2030. Meaning we are taking out more than is goin in, much more. The same experts say that it could take at least six thousand years to replenish the aquifer naturally from rainfall. This in a region that produces a substantial amount of the world’s food from ground water irrigation.   

A day of reckoning is coming.   

I apologize for going on, but I loving knowing this stuff, which might alert you to the possibility that I don’t have a life.

Think of it this way. Reading this will help you get to sleep, and quickly at that, thus solving your insomnia problem, so you can quit taking that extra slug of 101 Wild Turkey or those Ambien or Valium pills at bedtime.

The intrepid Flicka II sojourners go forth in search of camping accommodations in the Rita Blanca National Grassland but there is no room at the inn. There is no inn.

Its late, we are tired and hungry. The closest town now is Dalhart, Texas, so away we go to Dalhart, on the western edge of the Texas Panhandle in the flattest, featureless country yet.

Dalhart, TX (population 7,930), smack dab in the middle of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the ‘Dirty Thirties’ as people called it.

We come into Dalhart from the north on route 385 at night. 

We see the lights first. Then the lines of stainless steel tankers going in and an equally as lengthy line of tractor trailers coming out of a security fenced wrapped behemoth of a compound.

We creep by in amazement at the shear size of the place. The trucks coming and going reminds me of a scene in a 1978 remake of the classic movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which glassy-eyed, duplicate, alien-controlled humans fill tractor trucks with alien ‘pods’ and deliver them to cities and towns throughout the American hinterlands, where more glassy-eyed alien-controlled humans place them in close proximity to real human beings controlled by the liberal media. The pods hatch to reveal mucus covered, duplicate humans cloned to become Fox News followers. Donald Sutherland is not a good guy in this movie. He was a first, but an alien pod took him over and he becomes a duplicate Roger Ailes.  

But, it’s not an alien pod plant, it is only a billion-dollar cheese processing plant, owned by the California based Hilmar Cheese Company. The Dalhart plant receives over one million gallons of milk daily from a half million cows and daily processes it into hundreds and hundreds of 640-pound blocks of Cheddar, Monterey Jack, Pepper Jack, Colby, Colby Jack and Mozzarella cheese.

Sounding pretty good right now to a couple of hungry wayfarers.

Besides the cheese farm, farming, ranching, feedlot operations, large-scale pig farms, the largest being a 21,000-acre Cargill owned hog processing facility. Hot dogs anyone?

The plant uses the milk and lots and lots of water to make the cheese. Guess where the water comes from. That’s right. The Ogallala Aquifer. In fairness the plant returns about 2.2 million gallons of wastewater per day by either injecting it into another aquifer (where ever that is) or for irrigation on adjacent agricultural lands, where, once applied, it picks up pesticides and fertilizer and percolates back into the Ogallala.   

We drive deep into the guts of Dalhart, TX and cruise Liberal Street searching for a motel. There has not been a liberal in Texas since Donald Southerland converted all to alien-controlled Fox News followers, so the name of that street is an enigma.

First, we try La Quinta where they want $180 a night. Being the cheap bastard that I am I put my foot down and say no way. Big mistake. 

We move down the line to the 3-star Rodeway Inn where a stout, curry coated Eastern Indian woman rented us a dingy cubicle for ninety dollars. By now I really needed a drink, so I went looking for the icemaker. Up on discovering that it was not working I went to the office to lodge a complaint. The curry coated Eastern Indian woman offered a cryptic apology and then cajoled me into following her to the utility room where she implored me to help her fix the wiring that supplied the icemaker and half the window mounted air conditioners in the place. The 1940s fuse box was a medusa of trembling, burnt wires that reminded me of the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts, in which Jason and his stoned-out friends search for the Golden Fleece, fighting all manner of fantastical beasts along the way; including the Hydra, a monster with nine Donald Trump orange-haired heads attached to writhing snake bodies; the whole affair looking vaguely like the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner.
According to legend, the Hydra grew two more heads when a reckless Argonaut loped off one. Two more Donald Trump orange-haired heads. That is what this fuse box looked like. A bunch of Trump heads writhing on snake bodies attached to burnt, undersized fuses with pennies behind them.

No thanks.

I respectfully declined the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner’s request and returned to our room to do my yoga exercises and drink warm 86 proof Black Label Evan Williams bourbon. More than I should have.



All is good. Tomorrow is a new day.

Day #95. September 21.

Hello folks. I'm going to try something today. Click on the link below that will take you to a map of todays places.

Day 95 September 21 Map

We leave the Organ Mountains Desert Peak campground after a hearty breakfast and the lifesaving coffee fix. Saw a coyote on the way out and two batteries of Gamble’s Quails, native birds of this hot, dry Sonoran Desert country. These beautiful creatures do not migrate, rarely fly and spend their days scurrying about in brushy desert undergrowth, foraging on grass, shrub, cactus and tree seeds and gobbling up insects, spiders and small reptiles. Yum! Yum! Nothing better than insect, spider and reptile stew.

Gamble's Quail Habitat

We travel northeastward and descend into the Chihuahua Desert Tularosa Basin, out of which no water flows and into which very little water flows. The only other water input to the Basin is a paltry ten inches of precipitation a year, most of that coming during the ‘rainy season’ from July through September when day time temperatures can rise to 110 degrees F. 

We Are Talking Real Desert Country

What does not sink into the porous, salty, high mineral content, alkaline soil evaporates in this withering heat, so there is very little surface water aside from a few shallow, salty, seasonal lakes. That means that this is a hot, damn dry, harsh, foreboding place. Despite these austere conditions, before Anglo settlement certain parts of the basin supported lush and nutritious, native grasslands that could grow five feet tall in wet years.

The Mescalero Apache were here first.

Hispanic farmers showed up in 1862.

The US military charged onto the scene with their repeating Spencers to protect the Hispanics from those pesky Mescalero Apaches.

Anglo cattlemen and farmers invaded in the late 1870s. Their cattle, lots of them, overgrazed the grasslands and most of the rest of the basin, causing severe top soil erosion.

The Mescalero Apaches ate more peyote and laughed.

With very little surface water available for crops the settlers tapped the shallow fresh water aquifer. That fresh or ‘sweet’ water, as it’s called, was floating on top of brackish water.  Once the fresh water was gone, which didn’t take very long, the wells pumped brackish water, which when applied to the soil, concentrated salt and gypsum minerals even more. That higher salt content surface water flowed back into the aquifer in a never-ending cycle of increased salt concentration.

Farmers continued to pump ground water and irrigate this way well into the late twentieth century. Once the cycle starts it is very hard to reverse. This increase in ground water salinization has occurred in many other areas in western states when industrial farmers pull ground water from aquifers and use it to irrigate high mineral content soils. Over time some cultivated areas are too salty to farm.

In 2004 the federal government started the Tularosa Basin National Desalinization Research Facility at Alamogordo, a joint project of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation and Sandia National Laboratories. Scientists working at these federal facilities are researching procedures to reverse soil salinization and creation of brackish water.

Guess who pays for that. You can bet it’s not the conservative leaning, well-heeled industrial, agricultural interests, who give generously to their congress men and women, who would never vote for a piece of favorable legislation just because someone gave them a little ole campaign donation. Sound familiar?

Enough proselytizing.

On we go to the White Sands National Monument, part of an eye-popping 275 Tularosa Basin square miles of white sand dunes comprised of gypsum crystals.

White Sands National Monument Gypsum Flats

Gypsum Dunes

Gypsum is a water-soluble sulfate salt complex found in great abundance in the mountains ringing the Tularosa Basin. If the Basin had an outlet to the sea over geologic time the gypsum would dissolve, and surface water would carry it to the sea. Since it does not, the gypsum ladened water evaporates in the wilting heat, leaving vast gypsum deposits in the form of crystals, some reaching three feet in length. Prevailing winds erode the crystals down to sand-grain size particles and whip them up into impressive dunes, which support all manner of interesting plants and animals that ride along as the dunes migrate downwind.

Soap Tree Yucca

Interestingly enough, even in the hottest summer months, one can walk on gypsum 'sand' barefooted, because, unlike dunes made of quartz-based sand, gypsum does not convert the sun's energy into heat. 

Big Gypsum Dune

Just to make things interesting, the White Sands Missile Range lies just to the north of the Monument, where our government tests new and innovative weapons of mass destruction to stay one step ahead of the Russians and Chinese. We think?

The Mescalero Apaches eat more peyote, but they are not laughing.

From White Sands we travel to Alamogordo (population 30,000), mostly retired military folks, near Holloman Air Force Base.  Close by, on July 16, 1945 the US government conducted the Trinity test, the first test in the world of a nuclear weapon, a progenitor of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945.

They didn’t waste any time on that one, did they?

We head out from Alamogordo on 54 north, mesmerized by this vast desert country. White Sands Missile Range just to the west, the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation just to the east. A right turn  takes us 15 miles along a hard packed dirt gravel road to the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, where one can find 21,000 separate and distinct petroglyphic rock art carvings of masks, sunbursts, handprints, birds, humans, animals, fish, insects and plants, as well as numerous geometric and abstract designs dating back to about 900 to 1400 AD, when Jornada Mogollon people ate some peyote, took another toke and used stone tools to remove the dark patina on the exterior of the basaltic rock and carved these remarkable images.

Petroglyphs on Basaltic Rock

If these folks were not eating peyote I just don’t know!

Hot dry Country Around Three Rivers Petroglyph 

Back out to 54 and north on Three Rivers (population 10 near as we can tell), Oscura (population 10 ghosts), Polly (population 6 ghosts) and finally to Carrizozo (population 1000 live people) where we gas up with a burrito at the Carrizozo Café, which helps us fart our way west on route 380 to our final destination for the day, the magnificent Valley of the Fires.

The Malpais Lava Flow, a four to six miles wide, 160 feet thick, 5,000 years old sculpted basaltic monolith covering 125 square miles, thought to be one of the youngest lava flows in the continental United States. The flow originated from Little Black Peak, about ten miles northwest.

Five thousand years ago the lava flow was barren but nature and time painstakingly decorated it with flowers, cacti, trees and bushes, bats, roadrunners, quail, cottontails, mule deer, barberry sheep, lizards, great horned owls, burrowing owls, turkey vultures, hawks, gnat catchers, cactus wrens, sparrows and rattle snakes, lots of rattlesnakes.

Lava, Lava Everywhere

Trail Leading Into The Lava Flow

There is a Bureau of Land Management campsite here, situated on a high bluff overlooking the lava flow with isolated individual sites and fabulous views of the Tularosa Basin in every direction, picnic shelters, tables, grills, potable water and hot water showers, for five dollars a night for us poor old folks.

Windy, windy, windy! 

More Scenes in the Valley of Fire

Cane Cholla, Valley of Fire

An Ancient Juniper and My Not So Ancient Sweet Juniper

Lava Gas Bubbles

Lava Flow

Sunset Over The Valley Of Fires