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.