Captain Obvious; "The desert is hot!"

For the last two weeks of May the temperatures here in the New Mexico desert have been frequently exceeding 105 degrees (40.5 C).  I know everybody says "it's a dry heat", but once at that temperature, and above, it's HOT!  Our poor old RV air conditioners just can't overcome the solar gain being put into the rig every day.  We are fully broadside to the glaring sun all day long.  Temperatures in our living area are hovering around 84 deg by mid-day and we don't get below 80 again until after 9:00 pm.  They will continue to run a good part of the night to get the temperature down to its set point of 75.  The bedroom being a much smaller area does a little better by about 5 degrees.  We have taken to putting a fan at the top of the steps and having it blow air from the bedroom down into the living/galley area.  It only makes a small difference but we're taking anything we can get.

My brother and his family are coming to Roswell for the Memorial Day weekend and we are looking for something to do that won't give everybody heat stroke.  Lucky for us Carlsbad Caverns National Park is only about an hour south of us.  We're headed underground!

Carlsbad Caverns on the approach to the Big Room.
Look real hard right in the middle and you can see people, gives a little perspective on scale.

We achieved our goal of doing something out of the heat, temperature in the cave was about 68 degrees while outside it was 105.  But we were not the only ones that had this idea.  There were throngs of people, you didn't do anything without standing in a long line.  And the longest lines of all were the ones waiting for the elevators.  It seems that the primary elevators have been out of commission for months and that there was only one of two alternate/freight elevators working.  Our tour of the entire cave didn't last as long as the line for returning to the surface.  My brother and his family opted to do the one hour walk out of the cave but this was not an option for Cyndee.  Her knees just wouldn't be able to do the incline up and out.

But it all worked out, the wait in line gave us an extra two and half hours of agreeable temperatures.  We still got out early enough to get back to Roswell and start dinner before it got dark.

The next couple of weeks the heat continued and we kept looking for things to do that would minimize the heat.  Gaining elevation was about the only answer other than going back to the cave.  So we headed for Cloudcroft, NM.  Cloudcroft is a quaint little mountain town about an hour and a half from Roswell.  Its record high temperature for the month of June is 89 degrees, with an average high of 74.  Yeah, we'll drive an hour and a half for that.

The town sort of has two main streets, the one that is the main road through town and another just off to the side that is only a few blocks long.  But this is the one that has all the shops and eateries that tourists like us are interested in.  We dove in and and went in any shop door that wasn't locked.  At one point stopping at a sandwich shop and taking our purchase to a table on the wooden sidewalk outside.

Old West Charm.
Downtown Cloudcroft, NM

Just on the outskirts of the town is an old abandoned railroad that once served the community and provided a way for the people in the hot deserts of El Paso and Alamagordo to get to the cooler climes of the Sacramento Mountains.  The trains ran from 1899 to 1947 at which time the rail was abandoned in favor of improved roads that could handle both cars and heavy trucks.  The rail line itself was stripped of its materials and the trestle fell into disrepair.  In the following decades the rail line was converted to hiking trails and the trestle itself has been rehabilitated.  No trains run on this few hundred feet of track, it's just fun to look at.

Mexican Canyon Trestle.
This is the tallest trestle built on the route from Alamagordo to Cloudcroft. 
Constructed in 1899, the trestle is 323 feet long and 60 feet high. 
All of the trestle's original timbers, including posts measuring 12" x 12", were cut from local Douglas-fir. 

 While on the trestle viewing platform, if you turn and look due west, the distant horizon becomes bright white and featureless.  You realize that you are looking about 35 miles away at White Sands.

White Sands National Monument as seen from Mexican Canyon Trestle

We are now in countdown mode for departure from New Mexico.  When June is done, so are we.  We'll be pulling up and heading first for Texas and then by July 9th we'll be in Kansas.  Texas will be for some much anticipated time with family and Kansas for some dreaded time at our camper's factory/repair center for some serious repairs.

New Mexico Desert Life - Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge

The air is hot and the ground is warm.  Things are starting to stir here on the refuge.  Most of the migratory activity is done and we are settling down to the birds that will be with us for the duration of the summer.  Some are migrators that decided they like it here just fine and let their compadres move on while they set up housekeeping right where they are.

White-faced Ibis

It's not a very good shot because it was taken at such great distance but this is fourteen white-faced ibis on a pond in the north sector, a section that is restricted to public access.  I'm going to keep stalking these guys and see if I can get a close-up.

Red-winged blackbird

The red-winged blackbird we have aplenty.  Between them and the dove I can't hardly keep food in the bird feeder.  But the picture above is where I caught one perching out near a marsh.  All those little spots in the picture are not dust on the lens, but gnats on the wing.  Those gnats have gotten so thick it makes it almost impossible to sit out in the evenings.

Some of the parks most famous residents, dragonflies, are beginning to emerge from their watery nursery.  Bitter Lake has more species of dragonflies than anywhere else.  Sixty-five of them at last count.  They'll be everywhere by late summer and they will peak with the Dragonfly Festival that is held the beginning of September every year.

Cyndee captured this blue one on a branch in the vegetation island in the parking lot.

Got this guy just outside the visitor center, near the butterfly trail.

Not everything is about winged animals.  Capitan to our west has been providing some pretty nice sunsets lately.  With air so dry there is very little haze around these parts.  Taking pictures of large vistas is much easier than it is when in humid country.

Capitan Mountain
View from our RV at Bitter Lake NWR

We finally got some rain, just a tad over half an inch.  But that little bit of rain changed the light tremendously.  Before, anytime I tried to shoot a landscape the light was completely flat.  There was barely any distinction between sky and ground and the ground was featureless.  But that little bit of rain changed it all.  On one of our routine patrols around the refuge I snapped over sixty shots.  For the month prior to this I snapped zero.

Driving Tour Overlook.
Looking North-Northeast

Driving Tour Overlook.
Looking South-Southeast

As I mentioned earlier, the ground is warming up and this has the cold-blooded residents starting to move.  People have been reporting snake sightings almost daily for the past couple of weeks.  For the most part the Fish and Wildlife employees say: "Thanks for letting us know", and go on about their business.  But when a report of a rattlesnake at a trail head or door of a building they go into action and deploy their snake sticks and snake cans.

Western Diamondback Rattlesnake
Captured at the entrance to the butterfly trail near the visitor center.

 The snake will be carefully captured, placed in a snake can (a lined 35 gallon trash can with a locking lid) and relocated to a part of the refuge where they are less likely to come in contact with people.

On the same day that the lighting improved for shooting landscapes it also was the best we have seen for photographing anything outside.  Up to this point all pictures taken of wading birds came out little more than dull silhouettes.  But on this day it was possible to get shots clear enough to see the eyes of the bird.

American Avocet

Black-necked Stilt

Snakes are not the only cold-blooded critters that are coming out.  This yellow mud turtle was spotted by Cyndee along the edge of the driving tour road.  That's saying something since this full-grown turtle achieves a shell length of only 4 -5 inches.  The one below was barely 3 inches.

Yellow Mud Turtle

After getting this photograph we came home and ID'd what she was (yes we can confirm it was a female by the lack of a barb on its tail).  The thing that surprised us both was its lifespan - 50 to 65 years!  That's a long, long time for any animal to live in this harsh desert environment.

While the warmer temperatures have brought the animals out, the people have been not so much.  Our visitor-ship has dropped from 30 to 50 a day, it has been running 7 to 10 lately.  Maybe when the schools let out and people start vacation it will pick up again.  But hey, after our experience at Victoria Campground on Lake Allatoona in Georgia we are thoroughly enjoying the less-intense public interaction.  The best part is that the public we do interact with have been genuinely nice.

Stay tuned, we'll be going after more New Mexico life in coming days.

Spring has Sprung - Desert Bloom

While temperatures have been plenty warm since we arrived the first of April at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge (Roswell, New Mexico), desert life has been a little hard to come by.  But in recent days here in the middle of May things are starting to emerge.

One of the duties of volunteers at the refuge are to water the vegetation "islands" in the visitor center parking lot and around the building.  These islands are made up of native, hardy desert plants but a lack of measurable rain for the past eight months is even a little much for them so we are hand watering every week or so.  This little bit of moisture has made a difference, we are getting blooms here at the visitor center.

Claret Cup Cactus

Ocotillo

Butterflies and hummingbirds come in for these Ocotillo blooms.

We had not been near an ocotillo since our volunteer days at Big Bend National Park in 2013/14.  We had almost forgotten how extraordinary the transformation from what looked like dead, brown "rain sticks" to green and white-striped branches topped with clumps of orange blooms that call in butterflies and hummingbirds from afar.

I don't know what this cactus is but it burst with blooms.  The buds took days to develop but once they started opening up, it was only minutes before the cactus was covered over by blooms.  And it is a good thing I took the picture when I did because they were very short-lived.  They were completely gone by the end of the next day.













The Desert Willows are doing very well on their own.  We have noticed these trees blooming all around the area.  It would seem that the bees are particularly fond of these blooms as they can be seen all around these trees but ignoring the cactus flowers at the base of the tree.

Desert Willow and local pollinator.

Desert bloomers are not the only ones showing a little color lately.  This refuge is big on things that fly and over the course of all four seasons it sees a tremendous variety of winged animals.  Even though we grew up in a similar semi-arid environment, we were to the east and north of Bitter Lake and on the edge of the central flyway.  Bitter Lake NWR is smack in the middle of the flyway and all the birds know this is a good place to rest and refuel.

Yellow Headed Blackbird.
Our first time to see one of these.

 Our RV pad, which is near the old visitor center/admin building that is now home to the biology group, is a favored habitat for the non-wading birds in the refuge.  We have year-round residents, a covey of 10 scaled quail that are visible almost all day long, scratching around in the brush or getting water from the weather station's evaporation tank.  These guys are comical to watch.  The covey travels loosely together with pairs staying closer together.

Scaled Quail (aka Blue Quail)

You can see the pecking order at work when they come together under the bird feeder.  There is always one bigger bird that decides who gets access to the best spot and works hard at being sure the other birds keep their distance.  But the most comical part is when they are on the move.  They stand so erect, with their necks stretched straight up and their little cotton crest standing out.  They run from one spot to the next, legs moving furiously but bodies gliding as they zig-zag through the brush.

We've had a mass of beautiful purple flowers growing all around us since arriving.  They have recently matured and become big enough that one could see there was a uniqueness to their stem shape.  We clipped a few stems and brought them inside to research what it was.  It didn't take long before we discovered it was called Scorpion Weed.  The distinctive curl at the end of its stems giving rise to its name.  But much to our surprise we also learned that the weed had an oil with properties similar to that of poison oak.  The oil does not affect as many people as poison oak does and for those that do react to it, it is a milder rash, but it is still a rash.  We took those clipping outside post haste and washed thoroughly.  We'll just enjoy them from a safe distance from now on.

This next specimen, a Bullocks Oriole, was very difficult to photograph.  It was a very nervous feeder.  He only made an appearance at the feeder (suet cake only) for a few seconds a couple of times a day for about a week and then he was gone.  The picture below was a matter of having the camera setting on the table that looked out onto the feeder and doing a very quick point-and-shoot through heavily tinted glass.

Bullock's Oriole

On the other hand, this guy below is the opposite of nervous.  We call him our lounge rabbit.  He just eases up to the RV pad, picks out a tasty clump of grass, sometimes right at our feet, and kicks back for a leisurely meal.

Once he is done with his munching he will find a comfortable spot nearby, lay down, front paws stretched out in front, rear end like he's sitting side-saddle and there he'll stay for the better part of an hour.

If it weren't for the wind this place would be awesome.  But we do have wind, and plenty of it.  Now, as spring nears its end the heat is kicking in.  We've already spent five days at a time with temperatures in the mid and upper 90's, broke 100 deg a half dozen times.  It won't be long that we will have long stretches of days well above 100.  That's the desert for you, we knew about it coming in and it is everything we remember.

We Be Tourists! South-Central New Mexico

Today's adventure takes us to the middle of New Mexico.  Our activities will center around Socorro, NM, beginning to its south at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.  We've a 3-hour drive to get to the refuge.  We'll repeat some of the same track as yesterday, passing through part of the Hondo Valley, turning in Hondo itself to stay on highway 380 towards Capitan and then on to San Antonio (the New Mexico one, not Texas).  At San Antonio we turn due south arriving at Bosque del Apache in just a few minutes.

Bosque is very much like Bitter Lake, only more than twice the size at just over 57,000 acres.  There are managed marshes with a plethora of birds.  We visited with the volunteer visitor center hosts for a short while before heading out on the driving tour.

Herons and Egrets

My new favorite duck, the Cinnamon Teal.  It's not the black one in this photo.

My former favorite duck, the Mallard.

Great White Herons

Got close enough to this one to see the color of his eyes.

Since there was a lot of ground to cover on this day we took the short driving loop, about 10 miles, and then headed for our next destination, The Very Large Array (VLA).  This is definitely a geek trip, the VLA is gigantic science project.  There are 27 eighty-two foot tall radio telescopes spread out over thirty miles of desert floor in a "Y" shape.  These receiver dishes peer deep into space and record radio wave emissions that produce images of astronomical formations such as galaxies, nebulae and events like the birth of a supernova.  Not to mention an occasional eavesdropping in on ET.

Once you get past the above entrance sign they want to have complete radio silence.  You have to turn off anything that emits a signal - cell phones, bluetooth devices, fitness watches, etc.  If it emits a radio wave of any kind, they want it shut down.

Once that was accomplished we wound our way to the visitor center.  At one point near there there were signs at entrances to service roads that said: "Diesel engines only" and then showed an icon of a spark plug with a red circle and line through it.  They are really serious about stray radio waves.

VLA Visitor Center

The VLA's visitor center is a small, cramped space but has a considerable amount of information for those that want to get the full geek experience of the technology behind the operation.  There is also a self-guided walking tour behind this building with a good deal more information.  Unfortunately the wind was howling this day.  The dirt blowing in your face made it uncomfortable and the gustiness made it all but impossible to hold the camera still.  We resorted to driving to what we could and using the inside of the cab of the truck as a wind-break.

Two of the twenty-seven antennas spread out over 30 miles of high desert (7,200 ft elevation)

Big Dude!
That's me (standing 6'5") barely visible at the base.
I am just a bit taller than the concrete pylons this thing is bolted to.

Intellectually I knew these were large antenna dishes but their enormity did not really sink until we got there and and stood in their shadow.  At 82 feet tall and weighing in at 230 tons a piece, these are not diminutive structures.

What is even more impressive, to me, is that they can not only point the dish at something and track it across the sky, but they can move the entire antenna up and down the 30 miles of railroad track they put in to effectively change the array's performance for specific jobs.  The work entails sliding a special rail car under one antenna at a time, unbolting it from its moorings, moving onto the main line and transporting it to its desired location.  Then reverse the process to get it off the rail car and back onto a mooring.  And they do this a couple times a year for most of the twenty-seven dishes.

Looking down the length of one of the legs of the "Y"

I came away with one photograph I particularly like.  It is essentially one third of the entire array configured to have the array in its largest formation.  I kept going back and looking at this photo so often that I decided to have the image put on a mouse pad.  That's a great solution for a full-time RV'er.  Space and weight are a huge issue, hanging photos or art is just not practical.  We've got family photos (small ones) in the few places that can hold them but practically speaking, there is just no good place to put wall art.  We do have a digital photo frame that has been great for doing a slide show of all the photos that we have loaded onto it, about 500.  But this personalized mouse pad afforded us the opportunity to have another way to enjoy one of our pictures.

Going to Bosque del Apache first put us a little late getting to the VLA.  They pretty much locked up behind us as we left.  We got back on the route that would take us through Hondo Valley and Lincoln, NM.  We tried to get some photographs of historical western landmarks from the Lincoln County War but the sun had set and the photos we took weren't worth the electrons they were made of.  Guess we'll just have to make another trip so we can do it right.

We Be Tourists! Southeast New Mexico

New Mexico is not an unknown to us.  We grew up (our first 30 years) in the panhandle of Texas, just a short four or five hour drive to Angle Fire or Taos.  We could leave home at 4:00 am and be standing at the ski lift by the time they opened.  In the summer Wheeler Peak was our favorite backpacking destination.  Park at the trail head at 9,000 ft, hike the seven miles to base camp at 11,500 ft, barf for a couple hours until the altitude sickness let up, and then do the peak the next day, topping out at 13,160 ft.

But that is all northern New Mexico.  We've squeaked out a couple of quick trips to Santa Fe and Ruidoso but didn't really get to explore outside of those towns.  Now, thirty more years later, we are back in the "neighborhood" and we are going to take advantage of it and explore a little.

This set of four days off, with cooperative weather, will give us the opportunity to explore a national park, White Sands, another NWR, Bosque del Apache and, in my opinion a national treasure, the VLA (Very Large Array).  We'll day trip to these places, probably using just two or three of our four days off.

First stop, White Sands National Monument.  It takes a about two-and-a-half hours to get there from our Roswell, NM location.  The drive is mostly on rough, narrow two-lane roads, winding through valleys and climbing small passes.  The scenery varies from desert to barren mountains, all of it gorgeous.

A few miles outside of Alamogordo, NM is White Sands NM.

These guys really really know how to do pueblo.

While the  visitor center and museum were pretty cool, we were here to be in the dunes.  So it was back in the truck and head into the dunes via the scenic drive managed by the National Park folks.  Going through this entrance gate was also the occasion for us to use our senior pass for the first time.

Yep, John reached the qualifying age for a lifetime senior pass card at the end of last year and we are finally getting to use it for a free entrance.  It's not the very first use though, on the way to New Mexico we stayed at a Corps of Engineers campground and the card got us half off of the camping fee.

We stopped a short way in and took a look back at where we came from.  The mountains in the distance is the Capitan range.  The only mountain range in the U.S. that runs East/West.  We were alongside this range for a portion of the drive between Roswell and Alamogordo.

We've been around sand dunes before but nothing this vast and nothing this white!  We had on dark, wrap-around sunglasses and were still getting "snow-blind".  It gave the camera fits too.  If the color was right the sand appeared featureless, but if you adjust to see features the sand starts to look blue.

The place is so big that there can be a lot of people without it feeling crowded.  There are picnic shelters set up in numerous places as well as back country camping.  We caught these folks doing a favorite activity when visiting the dunes, sand surfing.

I was hopeful that we would see some wildlife while in White Sands but I knew it would be a long shot.  To begin with they are predominantly very shy of human activity and then most are nocturnal.  Chances were remote we would see anything but we kept looking anyway.

Because this was a day trip there was not a lot of time to devote to any one activity.  We passed through Ruidoso at 11:00 am and stopped for an early lunch.  After all it was a Dicky's Bar B Que Pit, it's real hard to pass one of them up when they come along.  Then a few hours at White Sands and it was time to move on to the next thing, the missile museum in Alamogordo.

The Missile Museum sits high on the side of hill on the edge of Alamogordo.

Looking out over Alamogordo from the missile museum.

 We were a bit dubious at first.  We wondered aloud how anyone could make a museum about missiles be interesting.  But we were pleasantly surprised with just how fun and interesting it was.

There is an outdoor static display that you can walk up to these historic pieces and touch them.

The museum building was very tall, we presumed for displaying missiles in upright positions.  But it was not that way at all.  We arrived within an hour of closing time on a Sunday afternoon and pretty much had the place to ourselves.  The lady selling admission tickets said we would have just enough time to see the exhibits if we didn't linger too long.  The design of the museum was clever.  You took an elevator (which the inside was decorated to look like the command area of the space shuttle) to the top.  From there you were guided through the history of missiles and rocketry by following ramps down through the building.  It is very similar to the way the Tennessee Aquarium works in Chattanooga.

They locked the doors behind us as we left and we moved on to find something to eat before getting back on the road to Roswell.  On rare occasions I have posted pictures of food on this blog, usually when we were especially impressed or if something was unique.  On this day Cyndee had done an internet search for someplace with authentic New Mexican Mexican food.  Growing up where we did in Texas we are accustomed to what is commonly called Tex-Mex.  Tex-Mex is typically spicier and meatier than other styles of Mexican food.  We wanted to give the local fare a try and Cyndee's search turned up a place that got good reviews on Yelp.  We know that places can falsely pump up their ratings but generally speaking we have had good luck with the ratings.

John ordered the combo plate so that he could sample a little bit of everything they had to offer.  There were enchiladas, empaynadas and chili rellenos plus the sides of beans, rice and salad. 

The quantity of food was impressive but then the first bite changed any positive impression that may have been developing.  The grease was god-awful, and this coming from a boy raised in West Texas that didn't know food came any other way than fried until he was 20 years old!  And it wasn't just that the food was greasy, it was really old, burned grease.  It would be three days before John could get the coating of grease out of his mouth and another three days before he did not smell it with every breath he took.

Oh well, you win some, you lose some.  We'll continue our quest local Mexican food.

We'll get home well after dark on this night.  We will have to use the key code we were given to get the gate to the refuge open.  I hope we wrote it down correctly.

Tomorrow we will strike out again to see another wildlife refuge and a space science intense facility literally in the middle of nowhere.

The Office - Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge

We are getting settled in to our new volunteer assignment at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge.  Life in a wildlife refuge is different than our previous positions in national and state parks.  In the latter, the departments we worked for, their primary (or so it seemed) mission was to serve the people, at this wildlife refuge people are not first on the list.

But that is by design, it is a wildlife refuge, not a public park or zoo.  This refuge has just shy of 25,000 acres in its borders, only about 3,000 of it is accessible to the public.  The rest is fragile habitat and wildlife that is limited to human exposure.

However, that does not mean that Bitter Lake NWR is unfriendly to the public, just the opposite.  This facility has a really nice and relatively new (2011) Visitor Center and Headquarters building that was designed with the public very much in mind.  And this is where we work out of each day we are on duty.

The entrance to the visitor center from the parking lot does not hint at how great the rest of the visitor's experience will be.  There is a hint of the adobe/pueblo style that is typical for New Mexico but the other side leaves you thinking Frank Lloyd Wright.

Also not obvious from the front entrance is that the whole facility is set high on a bluff overlooking the marshes below.  

The rear of the building has a soaring arched awning that spans an inviting outdoor observation deck that comes complete with picnic tables.

There is an indoor observation deck too, and it comes with comfortable rocking chairs.  A pair of binoculars and your favorite drink and you'll be set for some serious bird watching.

The center of the Visitor Center is occupied by a nature exhibit.  I don't know who built the displays but they did a bang up job.  The dioramas are among the best quality of all the places we have been.

The above photos were taken from the back of the facility looking towards the front.  Early morning light coming in these east-facing windows made for a tough exposure.  But this same light is exactly what was needed for this next photo.  The large arch not only provides a dramatic awning for the outdoor observation deck but it also encompasses large panes of glass with murals of native flora and fauna.

And what visitor center would not be complete without a gift shop?  This is also our "base of operations".  When not doing daily routine chores such as watering the plant exhibit islands around the building, tending to the live fish exhibit, running the video for visitors or rounding up all the dust that blew in the day before, we greet visitors and run the gift shop cash register.

Not all assignments are routine though.  We have done some tree planting, updated and "refreshed" bulletin boards throughout the park, delivered dragon fly art contest entry forms to elementary schools all over the county and created fact sheets about the refuge's resident animals.  John is currently working on drawing (via computer) fire extinguisher maps for all the buildings and fire escape routes for same.

We are working Thursday, Friday and Saturday for now.  May first we will rotate with our co-volunteers and work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.