2006/01 Southwest USA trip (MN-TX) - Kilbourne Hole |
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Tuesday January 24th
We took a lazy start as we only had 230 miles to go to our next stop. So Sandie gave me a haircut, and we wrote and mailed our postcards, filled up with water, and dumped the sewage. Then we were off west across West Texas, flat ranch country with brown hills and mountains on the horizon. Occasionally we would pass orchards of pecan trees. Most of these seemed to have underground watering systems.
We passed the town of Fort Hancock, which a hundred years ago was an army post, defending against Mexican bandits. We arrived in El Paso in mid-afternoon, a big city sprawling a long way along the freeway, with another city, Ciudad Juarez, across the river in Mexico. El Paso had all the usual American chain stores and we stopped at Home Depot to pick up some lock washers and Loctite. One of the brackets to our brush guard (roo bars to those of you in Oz) fractured on our Labrador trip. It was replaced under warranty, but the bolts kept loosening on this trip every time we drove rough roads. This was an attempt to fix that problem.
The traffic in El Paso was frenzied: lots of low-rider cars and trucks and fancy wheels with spinners. We gratefully left the city’s hubbub and followed the instructions in Sandie’s Gem Trails book. The road took us across the Rio Grande, but into New Mexico, USA now, not into Mexico. The Rio Grande begins up north in Colorado, and then flows south across the San Luis valley past the Great Sand Dunes and south to El Paso, where it becomes the Mexican border until Brownsville and the Gulf of Mexico in the east . From El Paso west, the border with Mexico is a collection of straight lines at strange angles.
Unfortunately, since Sandie’s book was written, the area has become a new industrial estate, so we spent a while driving in and out of service roads to factories and an airport. Luckily, the book included a map showing the road running parallel with the railroad, and the track was still in the same place. From there on, the instructions were of the kind “4.7 miles to the third cattle grid and take a left 0.4 miles from there”. Amazingly this all worked out and we bounced our way across the desert on a sandy track, through miles and miles of not much but sand and creosote bushes.
After 30 miles we came to a great wall of sand, parked, and trudged our way up the wall. Wow! We were looking out over a great crater, ringed with black volcanic rock. We were on the rim of the ancient volcano known as “Kilbourne Hole”, famous to gemologists as a source of peridot (green gems). We didn’t have enough daylight left to find a way down to the crater floor, so we went back to the camper and drove around to where we could park on the rim and look out across the crater. Talk about a spectacular campsite! This is not a national park or monument, just a wonderful piece of scenery out in the desert.
The picture above of our campsite and the crater was stitched together from a half-dozen shots. That’s about the only way to photograph scenery on this scale.
By this time we had been on the road for three weeks and had just moved from Texas into New Mexico, so it seemed a good point to end Part 1 of our South West story. I had intended to print and mail this while we were still on the road, but somehow never had the right combination of energy and electrical power to get it finished, so I’m finishing it now back home in Minnesota, and looking out at the snow falling.
Love to you all from
Pete and Sandie