Chapter 38 – Kansas, Taos, Los Alamos
June 7, 1999
5/12 We got off to a fairly late start on our expedition to Oz, not pulling out of the campground in Tulsa until 11:30 a.m. However, the drive to Milford Lake State Park (near Junction City, Kansas) went faster than our computer estimated – just a bit over five hours. The weather was picture-book perfect – deep blue sky, fluffy little cumulus clouds, temperature about 75. Once out of Tulsa, traffic on US-412 and I-35 was light and the roads generally in good condition. Just past Wichita, we turned onto US-77 and felt transported back in time about 40 years. This is a two-lane ribbon of narrow highway, heading absolutely straight north, through rolling pasture, hay, or wheat fields. Our GPS compass heading sat firmly on 000 degrees, for many miles at a time, interrupted by brief jogs to the east (why always to the east?). There were towns marked on the map – but they must be ghost towns – we only saw one cluster of buildings worthy of being called a town, and it was well off the highway. The 90 miles had no traffic lights, two stop signs where other state highways crossed, plus the underpass where we crossed Interstate 70.
We're in the Hickory Hollow campground within Milford Lake State Park. It's a pretty place, but the campsites were designed by a drunken liberal arts major who had never seen an RV. I've used every one of our big pile of leveling boards, under wheels and jacks, and we're still not quite level. The sewer connection is uphill from the trailer – essentially useless. The 30 amp electrical plug is mis-wired – with hot and neutral wires interchanged – a potentially dangerous situation. We always plug in our handy-dandy circuit tester before hooking up, and this time, it paid off. I interchanged the wires at the junction box inside the trailer to compensate for the external problem. (The challenge will be to remember to change our wiring back the way it is supposed to be when we leave).
Since writing the above, we've heard that much of this campground was under water during a flood a few years ago. Hard to believe – we're on a hillside and appear to be at least 50 vertical feet above the lake level (and the lake is presently at its maximum normal level after an unusually rainy spring season). Milford Lake was built 30 years ago by the Corps of Engineers as a flood control reservoir – and has served that function admirably. Anyway, it is claimed that part of the reason that the individual campsites are so far from level is that the hillside slumped and shifted while under water. This campground is scheduled to get the sites re-graveled and leveled next year. The campsites in the other sections of the park have already been upgraded – many of them newly paved. Park management has said that our campground, the only one with sewers, has been the lowest priority for improvement: "since it always fills up first, before any of the other campgrounds, there is no incentive to improve it – people obviously are happy with it the way it is."
There are already at least 30 RV-Talk people here, and the official get-together doesn't start for two days.
I spent an afternoon repairing the front window stone shield/awning on our trailer. It has been gradually disintegrating for several months. The plastic apparently has become brittle with age, and a network of cracks had spread through much of it, with chunks beginning to blow away in the wind as we drove down the highway. I had been asking questions about a replacement, and as an alternative, also had been looking for material to repair the existing unit. Some weeks ago, I found, at a small specialty building supply store, a sheet of white fiberglass paneling which seemed suitable. The single available sheet was damaged, but the store owner had been saving it, reluctant to throw it away. I measured carefully, decided that I could salvage a large enough piece to fit the awning, and he gave me the sheet for free. This worked out well all around – I had been feeling bad about the need to buy a full 4' x 8' sheet and then to throw away about 2/3 of the total area. Anyway, I've been carrying this sheet of plastic in the back of the truck for weeks, waiting for an opportunity to do the repair.
The task turned out to be straightforward. I removed the entire assembly from the trailer (just a few screws), then disassembled the aluminum frame of the awning, enabling me to remove what was left of the existing plastic. I used the old plastic as a pattern to cut the new piece, reassembled the frame around the new piece, and bolted the whole thing back on the trailer. It looks and functions like new – except that it lacks the raised "Real-Lite" brand logo, and the white material doesn't quite match the off-white of the trailer.
5/19 the GTG is over (officially ended two days ago, but a few of us are still here). Not much specific to write about. We've been just hanging out – visiting with old and new friends, doing a few chores and maintenance things, catching up on our reading, processing a big batch of accumulated paper mail which arrived here, etc.
Shari Haywood did a great organizational job – working behind the scenes to make the whole event run smoothly while still keeping everything very informal and casual. There were 36 rigs here, probably about 75 people, 100 dogs, at least two parrots, seven pink plastic flamingos, and a cat or two. (There weren't really that many dogs, but it occasionally seemed that way – several rigs contained two dogs, one rig had three.)
The park has a lot of wildlife. There's often a beaver swimming around just off shore below us. We've seen deer nearby. A turkey walked across the road in front of us. Fireflies are all over the place. Last night, while downloading Email at the payphone near the park office, I heard what I assume was a pack of coyotes howling somewhere nearby. One evening while out on my bike, I startled a big skunk who was foraging along side the road. He did just what the books say he should do – stopped, turned away from me, fluffed out his tail to several times its normal size and raised it high in the air as a warning flag. I heeded the warning, and passed cautiously by on the opposite side of the road.
Birds are plentiful. We're serenaded every evening by several whippoorwills and a couple of owls. Half a dozen noisy bluejays act like they own the campground. Several interesting and unfamiliar bird songs intrigue me, but I've been too lazy to get out the binoculars and go identify the singers.
The weather provided one evening's entertainment - frequent warnings of tornadoes, severe storms, hail, and floods. The tornados all missed us (by at least 15 miles), although we got the edge of a couple of big thunderstorms. We're on a hill, so the flood warnings were not an immediate concern.
We spent that evening watching the clouds and listening to the tornado sightings and warnings. One bolt of lightning hit ground in the middle of our campground - less than 100 yards from us. The people in a trailer that was closer to it were watching television and the TV died- apparently permanently - when the bolt hit. Another trailer near us had their GFI circuit breaker trip and a picture fall off the wall - no damage. We noticed no effects at our trailer, other than the adrenaline surge from the bright flash and incredibly loud simultaneous crash of thunder. I went outside and looked around, expecting to see a tree smoking somewhere nearby - but there was no evidence at all of where it hit. The radio reported baseball-sized hail somewhere. We got heavy rain, but no hail.
We toured the New Horizons RV factory along with a bunch of other Oz2 attendees. I recommend this tour to anyone considering a mid-priced travel trailer or fifth wheel. The factory is quite small and turns out about one trailer per week, all semi-custom designs built to order, with a long backlog. They sell direct from the factory - no dealers. Their trailers exhibit good craftsmanship and solid construction, but are much too heavy for my taste.
A group of us went to a new Puerto Rican restaurant in Junction City. We had interesting, new-to-us preparations of plantain and cassava, but the meals were otherwise a big disappointment. We've eaten native food on several Caribbean islands, and all of it was highly spiced. Here, everything was bland and tasteless, and the meats were overcooked, tough, and dry. A Puerto Rican native in our group told me that the characteristic foods are indeed bland, with salt, black pepper, and garlic being the only common spices – but not *that* bland. The cook came out later and explained that they have to "tone down" the spices for the American palate. Perhaps in the middle of Kansas, and catering to the young soldiers from nearby Fort Riley, this is the right decision.
5/20 Our first hot day of the season, and I discovered that our air conditioner doesn't work – it overheated and tripped the circuit breaker after only a few minutes of operation. I found that the exposed fins on the roof heat exchanger were hammered flat – apparently by the hailstorm we experienced in Big Bend. These fins are protected from vertical hail, but this storm had high winds coming from directly behind the trailer - so the hail was moving almost horizontally, and bent every cooling fin flat, effectively blocking all airflow through the condenser.
I spent a long time on the hot roof, prying the tiny fins back into shape with the tip of a small knife, and only got about a third of the area "fixed". This was enough to get the air conditioner working (temperature was only about 90). But I'll have to spend another couple of hours finishing the job on a cool day.
5/22 We left Milford Lake this morning, headed west on Interstate 70, then turning southwest on Kansas 156. At Great Bend, we turned onto US 56, to join the route of the Sante Fe Trail southwest along the Arkansas River Valley, following it all the way to Dodge City.
A few miles east of Dodge City, we pulled off the highway into a "scenic overlook" on a little hill. It overlooked hundreds of acres of stockyards - which were up wind of us. The view of thousands of cattle and a few bulldozers pushing huge piles of manure around was uninspiring. The smell was indescribable. Not the best idea that Kansas ever had. We settled into Gunsmoke Campground in late afternoon but relaxed at the trailer and didn't go see Boot Hill and the other tourist traps in Dodge City.
After noticing an interesting fifth-wheel bunkhouse (with 14 separate doors!), we spoke to a young Australian who is traveling in it, with a group of migrant workers. They are in Kansas for the winter wheat harvest, which is about to begin. He is one of four Australians who flew to the U.S. to join this crew. He arrived in Denver two days ago. His Aussie accent is so thick that we had great difficulty understanding him, and his conversation was larded unselfconsciously with rural Australian colloquialisms which we thought existed only in old B movies. Later we saw another member of this group, wearing a T-shirt which advertised a sheep shearing contest. It's nice to know that some parts of the world are still true to their stereotypes.
5/23 We roughly followed the Sante Fe Trail all day – down US 56 from Dodge City to Clayton, New Mexico. It's an almost straight line southwest toward Sante Fe. Part way through the day, as we crossed from Kansas into Oklahoma, we were only about five miles from the Colorado border. Later, shortly after we crossed from Oklahoma into New Mexico, we passed 350 feet from a corner of Texas. Had we spent a few minutes on two short detours, we could have been in five states within a two-hour period.
The highway is an almost deserted two-lane strip of pavement, generally in good condition, pointing straight ahead out to the horizon. Cars were rare, and we saw only one big truck all day.
It seems that the railroad followed the Sante Fe Trail, then more settlements were built along the railroad, and then the highway followed the railroad from settlement to settlement. Every little town has its own huge grain elevator, visible for many miles across the flat or gently rolling farmland. The grain elevator is built right up against the railroad. The highway, built along the south side of the railroad, is arrow-straight from town to town, then makes a gentle little curve out around the grain elevator in each town, then follows straight along the track to the next town. Interestingly, all the little towns are on the south side of the tracks. Each consists of a pleasant cluster of trees, a few square blocks of houses, a few businesses along the highway and perhaps along a smaller crossroad disappearing off to the south, and a big farmer's cooperative between the highway and the railroad, encompassing the grain elevator, a farm implement store, a big propane supply depot, and occasionally a few other farm-related businesses. No traffic lights, and perhaps one stop sign at the major crossroad (which generally came in from the south and dead-ended at the railroad track, opposite the grain elevator). In one or two slightly bigger towns, the town had spread across to the other side of the tracks, and the highway had been re-routed in a larger semicircle around most of the town.
As we headed southwest, gently climbing up toward the mountains, the climate became gradually drier. Lush farmland increasingly depended on massive irrigation systems, fed from deep wells. Then we climbed beyond the reach of the water table and the irrigation faded out, limiting the farms to winter wheat, hay, and alfalfa. Then, the wheat faded out too, and we were driving through cattle ranches interspersed with hay or alfalfa – already being harvested. We began to see desert plants – cholla, opuntia, yucca, and those ubiquitous small gray bushes (sage?), interspersed among the grass.
Shortly after crossing into the extreme western tip of Oklahoma, the railroad disappeared, and we saw only a couple more grain elevators.
Clayton is the first town we came to in New Mexico. Nothing much here except a convenient KOA where we stopped for the night. Tomorrow, we'll move on to Los Alamos, New Mexico to see if it's changed in the 39 years since we spent a summer there.
5/24 At the last minute, we chose the scenic northern route through the Sangre de Christo Mountains from Clayton to Los Alamos, rather than taking Interstate 25 down around the mountains. Then, we realized that this route would take us through Taos, and decided to stop there for a couple of nights.
The drive started out as rolling grassland, and gradually became foothills, then became real mountains shortly after we crossed I-25. A large black thunderstorm greeted us as be began to climb into the mountains and gave us an impressive lightning display, but missed hitting us directly. It rained most of the time from then until we reached Taos. The scenery was beautiful even in the rain. During one break in the rain, we pulled off the road alongside a pretty mountain stream, and found half a dozen kinds of wildflowers within a few feet of the car. The "yellow pea" or "false lupine" was putting on a real show along the creek – a new variety to Helen, who I sometimes assume has already seen (and usually grown in her gardens) every flower species known to man. We passed through the "wild west" town of Cimarron and the resort town of Eagle Nest without stopping, and arrived at Taos Valley RV Park in mid-afternoon, in a cold rain. We quickly plugged in the electricity and holed up in the trailer to wait for the rain to stop before unhooking and completing our usual set-up chores.
This is a very nice (and modem-friendly) RV Park – with long concrete pull-through sites, nicely separated by islands of sagebrush and occasional trees. I had never thought of sagebrush as attractive, but here, it has been tended and pruned, and makes a good-looking landscape bush. In the evening, walking around the park, I saw a male and female pair of mountain bluebirds – a new bird to me.
5/25 The Martinez Hacienda (in Taos) is a rather poor excuse for a museum, and didn't take long to tour. The large adobe building itself is mildly interesting (the earliest portions date to 1804). But the building is in poor repair, the grounds are shabby, the contents of the museum are sparse and interpretive material is also sparse.
We then headed out for a long sightseeing drive, first to the impressive bridge where Highway 64 crosses the Rio Grande gorge – narrow and 650' deep at this point. Then we headed up SR150 through a narrow canyon to Taos Ski Valley, looking for a NFS campground where we spent a couple of nights on our honeymoon 39 years ago. We didn't find it! The trailhead for the hike up Mt. Wheeler (13,200 feet – highest point in New Mexico) starts near the ski area. We hiked it when we were here in 1960. It's a little early this year to do it – the top still has a heavy snow cover. A thunderstorm blew in just as we started driving up the canyon, but it passed over fairly quickly, leaving us with overcast skies and light rain. We enjoyed the scenery anyway!
Back in Taos, we parked and spent an hour wandering around the old central plaza. It now has such a heavy veneer of tourist trappings that it doesn't seem old. There are dozens of tiny shops selling yuppie merchandise at inflated prices. We needed a few grocery items and stopped at the first big grocery store we saw – Cid's. It was a mistake. The place was full of aging hippies as well as a younger generation of counterculture types. The food matched the clientele – all overpriced, all chosen to support some current fad. "Natural" and "organic" were the most common buzzwords. We felt like we were in a living museum, observing the food fetishes of a recently discovered tribe of superstitious natives.
5/26 We squeezed in a visit to the Fechin House before leaving Taos this morning. Nicolai Fechin was primarily known as a Russian painter. He moved to the US in 1927 and spent six years building a house in Taos. The house is fascinating. Its basic elements are indigenous to New Mexico – a typical adobe house with two-foot-thick walls, exposed vigas (round beams supporting the ceiling), exposed lintels, etc. But the interior has echoes of a Russian dacha, mixed in with his collection of old Chinese art. The extensive sugar pine wood trim and support beams in the house are hand carved by Fechin, and many pieces of furniture are hand built and ornately carved by him. The overall effect is surprisingly pleasing.
The drive from Taos to Los Alamos runs through the Rio Grande valley, paralleling the river for a long way. The valley narrows in this area and the highway occasionally climbs high above the river, then dips steeply down through side canyons. As we drove, we watched a huge thunderstorm ahead of us, wondering if we would run into it.
At Espanola, we crossed the river to the west side of the valley, turned onto SR-30, and began the long climb up out of the valley toward Los Alamos. As we climbed, we began to get long views out across the wide valley to the mountains on the far side. The storms missed us, with only a little rain, and by the time we pulled into Juniper Campground at Bandelier National Monument, the rain had stopped. We were worried that with the Memorial Day weekend approaching, the campground might be full. But in fact, there was plenty of space, and we had our choice of many nice campsites. No hookups here, but it's cheap ($5/day with our Golden Age pass) and is convenient both to Los Alamos and to the Anasazi ruins and hiking trails of Bandelier.
5/27 The weather pattern seems to be consistent – a clear morning followed by afternoon thunderstorms. We headed into Los Alamos to pick up our mail (General Delivery) as soon as the Post Office opened, then drove to the Frijoles Canyon Visitor's Center in Bandelier. Then we headed out on the 3-mile round trip trail to the ruins, many of which have been excavated, cleaned up, and "stabilized". The artifacts found there have all been removed to museums. The cliff walls are a soft volcanic tuff, honeycombed with small caves. The Indians enlarged these caves, then built adobe rooms against the cliff in front of the caves. At one point, these buildings stretched continuously for 800 feet along the base of the cliff, two to three stories high. At the end of the trail, a series of stone steps and wooden ladders leads 140 feet up the cliff to a large natural cave, in which the Indians built a large Kiva (a cylindrical stone-walled underground ceremonial room). The Kiva has been restored, including a roof similar to the original – several large beams which support a crosswise layer of smaller wood poles, which in turn supports a thick layer of adobe. Access is via a hole in the roof and a wooden ladder. We were allowed to climb down into this Kiva. I sat down there in the dark imagining the religious ceremonies that would have been held here 800 years ago.
We got back to the car about 1:00 p.m., just as the daily thunderstorm arrived, and drove back to the trailer in the rain.
5/28 Hiked down Frijoles canyon to the Rio Grande and back – about 5 miles round trip. The creek has two attractive waterfalls about half a mile above the Rio Grande. Again, we got rained on as the early afternoon thunderstorm arrived. We were prepared, and continued to enjoy the hike, encased in Gore-Tex.
Ponderosa pines, particularly the largest, have an interesting odor. The book says vanilla, but there's an admixture of other spicy smells too – I imagined some cinnamon. On a still warm day, a tree trunk that is baking in a patch of sun is really pungent.
5/29 Helen went in to Los Alamos and had lunch with Cheryl Ammann (who had lived with us in Rochester 22 years ago), and spent the rest of the afternoon talking. Dave stayed at the trailer, puttered, wrote, read, and took a short hike cross country, south to the rim of the canyon. The forest is very open – scattered large ponderosa pines and little or no underbrush, making it easy to walk anywhere. One reason for the openness is that a major forest fire swept through here about 20 years ago. Charred logs are still visible here and there.
5/30 A long drive West and South to San Ysidro on SR 4 and then North to Cuba on SR 44, then back east through the mountains on SR 126, rejoining SR 4 North of Jemez Springs. We saw a large variety of interesting terrain, took a short hike to Jemez Falls, and enjoyed SR 126 – the worst state highway we've ever traveled. For about 25 miles in the middle, it is an unimproved dirt forest road, twisting up and down through interesting canyons and climbing up over passes at around 9000 feet altitude. Much of this highway runs through National Forest land, and we saw many people camping a short distance from the road – boondocking where ever they could get sufficiently far off the road. It's Memorial Day weekend and the roads, scenic pullouts, parks, and hiking trails are all crowded, even in this rather rural area.
5/31 The Tsankawi Ruins are a detached portion of Bandelier National Monument. A 1.5-mile round trip loop leads through the ruins from SR 4, north of White Rock (a Los Alamos suburb), climbing gently to the top of a small mesa overlooking the Rio Grande Valley. A large pueblo is on top of the mesa, roughly rectangular, and estimated to have had 350 rooms, two to three stories high. It is unexcavated, so all that is visible is a rectangular mound, surrounding a central plaza. The walls were built from blocks of tuff, carefully cut to be rectangular and fitted with thin adobe mortar joints. These people knew how to pick a site – they have the best view in the area. To the east, there is a long view out across the Rio Grande to the Sangre de Christo Mountains. To the west, the Jemez mountains are visible. Dimly visible in the south, 70 miles away, are the Sandia Mountains, just east of Albuquerque. The Mesa is composed of volcanic tuff – a soft white rock. A hard cap rock layer protects the almost vertical sides of the mesa. Down 50 feet or so from the top is another hard layer, creating a ledge around the south and west sides of the mesa, a natural front porch and trail.
Between these two layers, the soft tuff is full of small natural caves. Many of these caves were enlarged to form a living room. In front of the caves, rooms were built of rock collected from the talus slope below, and roofed in traditional fashion with adobe. The trails which climb up to these caves, and then on up to the top of the mesa, have been worn a foot deep into the soft rock by centuries of footsteps. Shortcuts are visible – finger and toeholds cut into the cliff face, allowing a precarious but quick direct ascent. Basalt and obsidian occur naturally, from the same volcanic source. These harder rocks provided the material for tools with which to cut the soft tuff. Petroglyphs are common, all along the cliffs.
This is one of the later settlements, built in the 1400's and inhabited until the late 1500's. The residents of the modern San Ildefonso Pueblo, 8-miles northeast of here, say that their ancestors lived at Tsankawi and other nearby ruins. Walking these ancient trails worn into the rocks, and thinking about the centuries of foot travel which created them, has helped us realize just how extensive a civilization existed through the southwest, up until just before the Spanish arrived.
There is still no certain knowledge of why these civilizations collapsed and disappeared. The most plausible explanations center around weather changes. Tree ring data indicates that there was a prolonged drought in the late 1500's, about the time when this pueblo was abandoned. These people had a far higher population density than could be supported by a hunter/gatherer society, had already cut all the trees and killed most of the wild animals, and so depended strongly on agriculture. A few consecutive years of crop failure could indeed have been catastrophic.
In the afternoon, we drove past the Los Alamos apartment building (a converted barracks) where we lived during the summer of 1960 (Dave was a Research Intern at the Laboratories). Then, we visited the Bradbury Science Museum. The focus of the museum is dual: first, on the brief history of the city and of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and second, on the current research programs of the Laboratory. The history of the Manhattan project and the atom bomb has been told so often that is seems very familiar to us, but we each discovered some interesting new details. Several of the exhibits on current research were also well done and interesting. The Laboratory's projects are remarkably diverse, including a major role in the Human Genome Project (they fully decoded chromosome 16).
6/1 We haven't exhausted our list of things to do in this area – but we're both getting itchy to move on. Last night, we stayed up late studying the map and plotting various routes north. The places we want to go in Colorado are scattered all over the map, and there's no obvious "best" route. Map'n'Go and Street Atlas are doing their usual thing – routing us over tiny state "highways". After having driven SR 126 a couple of days ago and finding it a largely unmaintained, narrow, steep, twisty, dirt road, preceded by signs saying "no trailers" and "impassable in inclement weather", we are a bit leery of New Mexico state "highways". It remains to be seen if Colorado is better.
Anyway, we eventually decided to head to the southwest corner of Colorado – to Durango and nearby Mesa Verde National Park. I'll end this chapter now, and try to get it edited and mailed more promptly than the last one.