Note from Shelly: This is a very welcome guest post! We met Tom and Amy at the Airstream rally this past fall. (They’ve been living full-time in their trailer for the past two years; they lived on a boat before that.) We talked about this topic at a brewery yesterday in Santa Fe. It’s tough […]
Author: Shelly
What National Monuments Preserve
That’s what I was going to call this post, seeing as how yet more national monuments are on the current administration’s chopping block, as well (of course) as the jobs of park rangers across the country at national parks and national historic parks. I knew when we started this “summer of parks” in the West […]
When Housekeeping Is the Barrier-Breaker
There’s a beautifully written book entitled, Housekeeping, in which author Marilynne Robinson’s radical hero, a vagrant, estranged aunt, moves into a rural house to be the guardian of two teen girls. What could be seen as her neglect of housekeeping allows nature to slowly take over the old house. What’s really happening is a breakdown of the […]
El Morro and El Malpais
These are national monuments in western New Mexico: off the beaten path, managed by the National Park Service. There are 138 national monuments in the United States and 63 national parks. El Morro Roughly, this means “The Headland.” El Morro is a giant sandstone outcropping with a life-saving pool of water at its base (created […]
Western New Mexico via BLM Land
We’re in the El Malpais National Conservation Area, a little north of the National Monument. Tracy’s walked on some of the lava flows that made people long ago name this the bad land, but I haven’t yet, so I’ll save those photos for another post. I can catch up to this point, though. We had […]
Camping and Hiking along the Gila River
We’ve spent a week boondocking in a horse corral between the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument visitor’s center and the trailhead to the cliff dwellings hike; in short, along the Gila River in western New Mexico. The Gila is one of the longest rivers in the West, with a gigantic watershed. People have lived along […]
“Cliff” Being the Operative Word in Gila Cliff Dwellings
I’ve never had a problem with heights, so all I was thinking about as we climbed the 180-foot ascent to see this archaeological find was my knee when it was time to go back down. Jeez Louise though, the second we approached the caves in the side of the cliff and I saw that there […]
Life Deep in the Desert
Between national parks, we stopped to visit friends Doug and Melanie as they prep their new homebase (an rv, of course) deep in the northern Chihuahua Desert. We drove seven miles down a dirt road with no development in sight to get to this park outside Deming, New Mexico, where Doug and Melanie have bought […]
Moving Sunlight and Changing Focus at White Sands National Park
How do I tell you about White Sands National Park in New Mexico? We spent only a day there (a short record for us), but my impressions are hard to pin down. Words aren’t enough, and photos are hard to take. I could tell you about the unique geographic features that come together to make […]
Exhausted and Exhilarated
We’re out of the doldrums into the current, and I’m wanting to put all my photos and impressions here in a hurry before I gather more. Gah, remember when I posted every single day from Death Valley? I’ll try not to do that to you now. West Texas Tracy fixed the hitch, he replaced the […]
