White Sands
Next stop, El Paso. We need to have a few minor repairs so we stay in a humungous camping parking lot behind a dealer ship/camping supply store. A sort of Home Depot for RVers. There are no trees, no potties, no other structures, but the sites are level and there are the wonderfully crude and peaky Franklin mountains that run down through the middle of El Paso and cause the Rio Grande to do a sudden loop. El Paso is a city, we are not fond of cities in general, and so we just keep going to the CG in Anthony, which straddles the TX NM line. Other than waiting for the repairs, we entertain ourselves by geocaching on a maze of dirt trails up on the mountains. There is an A (for Anthony High School) in white rocks on the flanks of the mountain and we huff puff up to the top of it. Pretty good for the over the hill team. We can do over the hill, just not very fast.
An amazing rig has pulled in here. It is a huge RV/truck built on a regular 18 wheeler cab with an extended frame, maybe 40 feet long and way high, too high for the usual mushroom of an air conditioner. I was painted a sort of desert color with western themed murals on it, and towed a car trailer that his pickup rode in, instead of just being towed behind. The car trailer was painted to match. And all polished and show ready. I was dying to see inside, so we sidled up while walking the dog and talked to the guy. He is a retired heavy equipment hauler. He and his wife built the inside part and had the rest done. $$$$$$$$. Peeking as casually as I could inside, the living quarters are way up in the air, maybe 4-5 feet up. There were no slides, but it looked pretty roomy. They had done the inside in rugged pine with cowboy related antiques hanging up. Under the bedroom in the rear was a hole that held two ATVS. I didn’t get to go in, probably I could have if I was bold enough to ask. Way too big for my taste, no good docking or camping in the woods, but it was a grand sight, and just goes to show you can make an attractive rig.
Heading north again, I finally got to see the wild pig, the javelina, by the side of the road. Short and full of black hair, I guess they are not really related to pigs. We have seen several road runners, who sort of lower their heads and run like hell, the cartoon version is not all that much an exaggeration.
We pass huge pens full of black and white Holstein cows, that go on and on, with no where that I can see to milk them. Thousands of them. Sometimes you will see an occasional retired diary beast in a feed lot, but in general it is the various beef cattle. The beef breeds are good at gaining weight and turning into steaks and burgers. Holsteins are the champions of the milk world, they give the most milk, that is their job. But their bodies are basically a skinny structure designed to carry an udder, so no one in their right mind would raise them for beef. A mystery.
After some research:
“Industrial milk, New Mexico style
Posted by Mark Winne at 12:17 PM on 21 Apr 2006
“New Mexico is the nation's seventh largest producer of milk. More importantly, it is the fastest growing dairy state, and, as of this year, home to North America's largest cheese plant, a facility that extrudes one truckload of processed cheese every hour.”
So they really are giant milk farms. In New Mexico. Elsie would have…a cow ? I grew up on a dairy farm, we only had 50 cows to milk at a time. The cow went out and ate grass and stood under trees. Vermont, Wisconsin. I guess it really doesn’t matter where. They don’t need a big barn to hide from the snow down here. We like to think that the cow up to her udder in alfalfa is “happier” than one in the mob scene in those dairy lots. Who knows. But it wasn’t the picture that Ben and Jerry’s would have chosen for an ad.
The other sight we see more and more as we go up the Rio Grande Valley is groves of pecans. Lots and lots of them. All the pecans in the world must grow here. I can’t imagine what kinds of machinery they use, the trees are pruned and trimmed and lined up in laser straight rows. An army of pecan trees standing at attention. Right now, they are leafless, brown-gray in neat rows.
“Harvesting pecans in Texas is a very difficult and demanding task. Pecans should be harvested, cleaned, dried, sacked, and sold before December 7 each year to maintain kernel quality and obtain a good price. This short seven week harvest season may have at least 14 days of delay because of rain. Some years rain and cold occur, making harvest difficult even for the strongest. Theft from man and animals, especially crows, can significantly reduce the pounds of pecans harvested, even when every effort is made to prevent it. Much of the Texas crop is harvested by machines such as trunk shakers, sweepers, and a number of other different types of harvesters. Some pecans are harvested by hand for cash sale to Accumulators.”
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/extension/fruit/pecanorchard/pecanorchard.html
Harvesting appears to consist of using a mechanical tree shaker, which is a sort of clamp that attaches to a tractor. I don’t know how it actually shakes the tree, but I think of a Jack Russell grabbing and shaking. Very undignified. Then as sort of carpet sweeper thing drives around and picks them up. And one has to worry about the nuts being too wet or too cold , and they have to be processed immediately. Kind of like the great race to get the sugar beets in.
Working our way up to Las Cruces, the first big city in NM, we turn up into a mountain range, and climb a long stiff grade over the Organ mountains (which look like a pipe organ) They are part of the San Andres chain that rims the west side, and then we have a long down grade into the great flat wide basin of the Tularosa basin. This is the first serious climb for the new heavier trailer, but the truck has no problems.
The basin was under the great Inland Sea once, was kicked up by the upheavals, and then the central area sank, leaving mountains and hills all around it. The basin is about 150 miles long and about 50 wide, and the rain coming off the mountains has no where to go but some shallow intermittent lakes. The gypsum in the rocks of the mountains goes into suspension in the rainwater, you can see this all over the SW, a sort of frosty look to the dirt after the rain. Here in the basin, the captive water evaporates, leaving the gypsum as selenite crystals, and the wind breaks the crystals up into White Sands.
About halfway across to Alamogordo you can see the dunes. Just like at Crane’s Beach in Ipswich MA, with some tough and dauntless plants managing to grow on them. The dunes move in the wind, and now cover an area of 275 square miles. Now a National Monument, but still under a sort of grandfathered usage so people are allowed to slide down the dunes and bring in booze to drink. I guess the locals have been having huge family picnics here for years.
The sand is like sugar, pure white, and soft, but on the dunes a little rain will compact it to a harder shell. It is pretty odd to see this without the ocean right there. They cut half of the movie out, the park with the waves and the seagulls. We hiked out on an earnest educational talk, and watched the sun set. I was a little disappointed by this, maybe it is more fun for folks who don’t know the sea.
Much more fun, the White Sands Missile Range has a museum and a whole herd of rockets and missiles and other things that can go flying off with a whoosh. The gumment bought up all the marginal goat and cattle ranches in the basin, and way on the north end at the Trinity site, assembled the first A bomb in the back room of an old ranch house. And blew it up. The museum has photos and models of this and the subsequent missile testing that still takes place at the southern end. In fact, about every two weeks they close the highway to traffic for a few hours so they can go bang with something. I learn that Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry who began with small bangs in Worcester MA, wrote about rockets, and the NYTimes ridiculed his ideas as hooey. He shrugged and went off to Roswell NM to keep at it, and was soon working for the gumment at White Sands.
The missiles stand up in their park with the big San Andres all rocky and dangerous behind them. I imagine what it was like for those pioneering missile engineers. Don tells me some stories about his experiences with the men and the missiles, and I realize that they were pretty much doing this seat of the pants. Lots of slide rules of course, but when it was time to actually push the button, anything might have happened. Good thing they had so much room to try things out.
An amazing rig has pulled in here. It is a huge RV/truck built on a regular 18 wheeler cab with an extended frame, maybe 40 feet long and way high, too high for the usual mushroom of an air conditioner. I was painted a sort of desert color with western themed murals on it, and towed a car trailer that his pickup rode in, instead of just being towed behind. The car trailer was painted to match. And all polished and show ready. I was dying to see inside, so we sidled up while walking the dog and talked to the guy. He is a retired heavy equipment hauler. He and his wife built the inside part and had the rest done. $$$$$$$$. Peeking as casually as I could inside, the living quarters are way up in the air, maybe 4-5 feet up. There were no slides, but it looked pretty roomy. They had done the inside in rugged pine with cowboy related antiques hanging up. Under the bedroom in the rear was a hole that held two ATVS. I didn’t get to go in, probably I could have if I was bold enough to ask. Way too big for my taste, no good docking or camping in the woods, but it was a grand sight, and just goes to show you can make an attractive rig.
Heading north again, I finally got to see the wild pig, the javelina, by the side of the road. Short and full of black hair, I guess they are not really related to pigs. We have seen several road runners, who sort of lower their heads and run like hell, the cartoon version is not all that much an exaggeration.
We pass huge pens full of black and white Holstein cows, that go on and on, with no where that I can see to milk them. Thousands of them. Sometimes you will see an occasional retired diary beast in a feed lot, but in general it is the various beef cattle. The beef breeds are good at gaining weight and turning into steaks and burgers. Holsteins are the champions of the milk world, they give the most milk, that is their job. But their bodies are basically a skinny structure designed to carry an udder, so no one in their right mind would raise them for beef. A mystery.
After some research:
“Industrial milk, New Mexico style
Posted by Mark Winne at 12:17 PM on 21 Apr 2006
“New Mexico is the nation's seventh largest producer of milk. More importantly, it is the fastest growing dairy state, and, as of this year, home to North America's largest cheese plant, a facility that extrudes one truckload of processed cheese every hour.”
So they really are giant milk farms. In New Mexico. Elsie would have…a cow ? I grew up on a dairy farm, we only had 50 cows to milk at a time. The cow went out and ate grass and stood under trees. Vermont, Wisconsin. I guess it really doesn’t matter where. They don’t need a big barn to hide from the snow down here. We like to think that the cow up to her udder in alfalfa is “happier” than one in the mob scene in those dairy lots. Who knows. But it wasn’t the picture that Ben and Jerry’s would have chosen for an ad.
The other sight we see more and more as we go up the Rio Grande Valley is groves of pecans. Lots and lots of them. All the pecans in the world must grow here. I can’t imagine what kinds of machinery they use, the trees are pruned and trimmed and lined up in laser straight rows. An army of pecan trees standing at attention. Right now, they are leafless, brown-gray in neat rows.
“Harvesting pecans in Texas is a very difficult and demanding task. Pecans should be harvested, cleaned, dried, sacked, and sold before December 7 each year to maintain kernel quality and obtain a good price. This short seven week harvest season may have at least 14 days of delay because of rain. Some years rain and cold occur, making harvest difficult even for the strongest. Theft from man and animals, especially crows, can significantly reduce the pounds of pecans harvested, even when every effort is made to prevent it. Much of the Texas crop is harvested by machines such as trunk shakers, sweepers, and a number of other different types of harvesters. Some pecans are harvested by hand for cash sale to Accumulators.”
http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/extension/fruit/pecanorchard/pecanorchard.html
Harvesting appears to consist of using a mechanical tree shaker, which is a sort of clamp that attaches to a tractor. I don’t know how it actually shakes the tree, but I think of a Jack Russell grabbing and shaking. Very undignified. Then as sort of carpet sweeper thing drives around and picks them up. And one has to worry about the nuts being too wet or too cold , and they have to be processed immediately. Kind of like the great race to get the sugar beets in.
Working our way up to Las Cruces, the first big city in NM, we turn up into a mountain range, and climb a long stiff grade over the Organ mountains (which look like a pipe organ) They are part of the San Andres chain that rims the west side, and then we have a long down grade into the great flat wide basin of the Tularosa basin. This is the first serious climb for the new heavier trailer, but the truck has no problems.
The basin was under the great Inland Sea once, was kicked up by the upheavals, and then the central area sank, leaving mountains and hills all around it. The basin is about 150 miles long and about 50 wide, and the rain coming off the mountains has no where to go but some shallow intermittent lakes. The gypsum in the rocks of the mountains goes into suspension in the rainwater, you can see this all over the SW, a sort of frosty look to the dirt after the rain. Here in the basin, the captive water evaporates, leaving the gypsum as selenite crystals, and the wind breaks the crystals up into White Sands.
About halfway across to Alamogordo you can see the dunes. Just like at Crane’s Beach in Ipswich MA, with some tough and dauntless plants managing to grow on them. The dunes move in the wind, and now cover an area of 275 square miles. Now a National Monument, but still under a sort of grandfathered usage so people are allowed to slide down the dunes and bring in booze to drink. I guess the locals have been having huge family picnics here for years.
The sand is like sugar, pure white, and soft, but on the dunes a little rain will compact it to a harder shell. It is pretty odd to see this without the ocean right there. They cut half of the movie out, the park with the waves and the seagulls. We hiked out on an earnest educational talk, and watched the sun set. I was a little disappointed by this, maybe it is more fun for folks who don’t know the sea.
Much more fun, the White Sands Missile Range has a museum and a whole herd of rockets and missiles and other things that can go flying off with a whoosh. The gumment bought up all the marginal goat and cattle ranches in the basin, and way on the north end at the Trinity site, assembled the first A bomb in the back room of an old ranch house. And blew it up. The museum has photos and models of this and the subsequent missile testing that still takes place at the southern end. In fact, about every two weeks they close the highway to traffic for a few hours so they can go bang with something. I learn that Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry who began with small bangs in Worcester MA, wrote about rockets, and the NYTimes ridiculed his ideas as hooey. He shrugged and went off to Roswell NM to keep at it, and was soon working for the gumment at White Sands.
The missiles stand up in their park with the big San Andres all rocky and dangerous behind them. I imagine what it was like for those pioneering missile engineers. Don tells me some stories about his experiences with the men and the missiles, and I realize that they were pretty much doing this seat of the pants. Lots of slide rules of course, but when it was time to actually push the button, anything might have happened. Good thing they had so much room to try things out.
posted by Thistledown24 at 8:58 AM
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