2006/03 Southwest USA trip (AZ-MN) - Three Rivers Ranch |
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We had a longish drive ahead of us across the mountains to the Carlsbad area, but we were going to make a quick stop at the Three Rivers Ranch to visit the petroglyph area. Of course, there’s rarely a quick stop at 
anywhere that’s interesting, so we blew our schedule for the day.
The petroglyphs were created by the Mogollan people, cousins of those we had visited at the Gila Cliff Dwellings, a few hundred miles away. However, these Mogollan lived in pit houses rather than caves, and they left thousands of examples of their art on 
boulders high on a ridge below the Sierra Blanco, a snow-capped 12000 foot mountain in the Sacramento range.
They made their art by chipping the patina off the boulders, and the patterns have survived well for about a thousand years. We spent a couple of hours 
hopping around up on the rocks finding depictions of rams, roadrunners, eagles, deer, human faces, and lots of geometric patterns. I have assembled a number of these into one picture, but remember that most of these were spread across a hundred yards and dozens of separate rocks. My favourite picture is on the left, a thousand-year-old depiction of the Geico gecko (USA TV ad for the Geico insurance company).
The Mogollon disappeared or moved or merged with other tribes, so we know no more of their history but the Three Rivers Ranch has been central in later history. Patrick Coghlan turned this and other lands into a cattle empire during the Lincoln County range war, with some help from Billy the Kid. Eventually he went bust and sold out to Albert Fall who later went to jail for corruption during the Teapot Dome oil scandal. The other villains in that scandal went free, so Fall was the original “fall guy”, contributing his name to the American language.
We drove the “Billy the Kid” parkway, a really well engineered road, across the Sacramento Mountains to Roswell. This was where the US Air Force announced back in 1947 that they had captured a flying saucer. They quickly withdrew the statement, but ever since then Roswell has been the subject of hundreds of novels and films about UFOs, saucers, and little green men. Today Roswell has the UFO Research centre, Saucer Museum, etc etc. That stuff’s fun, but not worth spending money on, so we moved on.
The land south of Roswell is absolutely flat, perfect for even the most inept little green pilot. We camped at Brantley Lake, actually a reservoir on the Pecos River, no more scenic than most man-made lakes, but it was a novelty to be camped overlooking water. The air was noticeably more humid than anywhere else we’d been in the last month and it stayed warm late into the evening. A great night for an alien abduction.
We got a message that evening from Christina telling us that our Mazda had suffered a water pump and radiator failure and required expensive surgery. To be fair it has 135000 miles on the clock, and we’re too cheap to buy a new car.