Monday, January 10, 2011 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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Condemned, San Antonio NM, January 30, 2010
Tomorrow I'm outa here
It's time to get a move on. I'm beginning to develop a case of what Brian Gore calls "hitch itch" on his goin' RV Boondocking blog, and I need to get moving before I into out a rash. I want to start my trek up the Rio Grande valley to San Antonio NM. I'm getting anxious to get up there to spend a month or so photographing the Sandhill Cranes wintering at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge before they head off for their summer nesting grounds in mid February.
I delayed my departure a day from LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM to put in long days yesterday and today to get some basic restructuring of this website in place. That's pretty much done and the old version of the site has been condemned.
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
Wind on the Gangplank
There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."
Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind." His mother, in her 1905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin: