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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| White Sands National Monument Gypsum Flats |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| Lava, Lava Everywhere |
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| 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
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| Cane Cholla, Valley of Fire |
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| An Ancient Juniper and My Not So Ancient Sweet Juniper |
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| Lava Gas Bubbles |
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| Lava Flow |
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| Sunset Over The Valley Of Fires |
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