Day 17 – To Carlsbad

While the others will take a more direct route to Carlsbad, Carmen and I are going to go a little out of the way and take a detour up to Lincoln, New Mexico, home of Billy the Kid.  So we head north on route 54 then turn north on route 70.  Then, we traveled west along route 380, the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway through Lincoln County. 

We stopped in the town of Lincoln and home of the Lincoln County war. 

Here is where Billy the Kid escaped from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s jail (above the courthouse). 

Not much is open, since it is the middle of October and way past tourist season, so we did not stay very long.  After walking around town and taking a picture of some of the old buildings, supposedly as they existed in the 1870’s, now tourist shops.

Leaving Lincoln, we are heading to meet up with the others, and will pass through Roswell.  Back on route 380 east we come across a group of Pronghorn Antelope.

Later as we near Roswell, Carmen took this picture of the longhorn bull.

Also, we passed some horses, not sure if they are wild or just out in the field.

Did I say we were going through Roswell, home of the alien crash in 1947?  We, or should I say I, had to stop and of course go into the UFO Museum.

Inside the museum we looked around at the different stuff and had to get a picture with some of my new friends.

After a visit to the UFO Museum, we were leaving and had to get a picture of Carmen with some sort of alien encounter.  Not a believer, she finds this amusing.  We stop for lunch before continuing on our way to Carlsbad.  We still have a little way to go before we get to our campground in Carlsbad and will probably get there in time for dinner. 

Day 16 – Three Rivers Petroglyphs Site

After leaving White Sand Dune NM and the White Sands US Army Missile Museum we headed to the Three Rivers Petroglyphs site.  It is around 5:00 pm when we get to the site and have a couple of hours before we have to leave.

Here we were able to see some really good defined petroglyphs on the rocks.  Is this suppose to be the sun?

This looks like a pyramid or house with smoke coming from the chimney.

This rock has a number of petroglyphs.  Something that looks like a beetle, an animal walking on its two hind legs, and others.

Ha!  I got my lizard picture almost right away.  He wasn’t very cooperative and wouldn’t look at the camera.  Do you think maybe he is camera shy?

This looks like a sun again, but with a cross inside.

Some geometric design, but what I thought really interesting was the big foot on the left.  Bigfoot was around back then also.

This was an interesting grouping, it had another sun, a bird, and what looks like a lizard.  Even they wanted to have pictures of lizards.

I cannot even imagine what this might be.

This is definitely a bear; or a mountain lion or is it just graffiti. 

Here’s Carmen on the trail, looking for more petroglyphs.

Look!  There are lizards all over the place here.  This is the sixth or seventh one I’ve seen.  First, I can't find any, now they are all over the place.

At this site, many of the petroglyphs are geometric in nature, like this one.

Now what is a zebra doing in North America?

Your guess would be as good as mine for what this is.

Is this a man chasing a velociraptor?

Now this is definitely a mountain sheep or an antelope with a couple of arrows in it.

Here are a couple of large rocks which have many pictoglyphs.  Either the person who did the big hand in the center had 6 fingers or he couldn't count.

From the top of the hill we have a great view of the surrounding countryside.

Although we still had more of the trail to go, we left so we could meet Shirley and Rick for dinner.  On the way back, we got a rolling picture of this car.  Someone is ready for a Mad Max scenario.  

Later that night, after it was really dark, I had very little ambient light with very dark skies so I took a number of pictures and created an overlay.  The results is this star trail picture with the north star in the center of the circles.  That is the back of my motor home on the bottom.  

Tomorrow we are heading to Carlsbad to see the underground caverns.

Day 16 –White Sands National Monument

We went to White Sands National Park this morning.  We left early, because we know that we spend more time than normal to hike around and other stuff.  Here’s Carmen at the visitor’s center before we began driving in the park. 

The visitor’s buildings are all in the Spanish adobe style.  I like these buildings, they are so nice.

We are beginning to enter the sand dunes and you can see them in the near distance.

There are all kinds of tracks around the dunes, if you look for them. 

Carmen on one of the dune trails we were walking on.  You can see one of the placards right behind Carmen.

More of the dune trail we are walking along.

Some of the trees and bushes we have seen in the dunes.  This tree is dead, but there were some that were alive.

The dune grasses looked like they were flowering and beginning to go to seed.  They looked too good to ignore.

Some of the flowers are pretty amazing. 

This grove of trees is in the middle of the sand dunes.  As the sand gets higher around the tree, it will kill the tree.

Almost at the end of the trail we came to this higher dune.  Here I am jumping, as best I can, off of the top of this dune.

Back on the road, we had to stop and take a picture of the sand spilling over onto the road.  It looks like a snow drift after being plowed.

The paved road ended and the “sand” road started.  When we got out the road looks like an ice road, with the cracks and transparency.

Even though I’ve been looking for a horned lizard, I only saw some tracks.  Alas even though I was looking, no Tarantulas today, only a lone beetle.  Check out this beetle I found walking around the dunes. 

Looks like a mountain range, but it is only sand!

We stopped on the side of the road and climbed one of the dunes, this one about 250 feet high.  Looking out from the top of the dune you can see the expanse of the dunes.  You can see my car on the left side of the picture.

We parked at the Alkali Flats trail, a 5 mile round trip.  The hike goes through the Gypsum Dunes and ends at the Alkali Flats.  There really are no markers, or if there are, they are too few, so to make Carmen comfortable, I took a picture of our sneaker prints so we could follow our tracks back.

The dunes are endless and after hiking for about a half hour we had this view.

Wow!  Carmen and I walked all over the dunes and had enough of walking on sand and were getting ready to head back until saw some people sliding down the dunes.  When they asked if we wanted to try, we borrowed a snow (ah, sorry, sand) saucer to slide down the sand dunes.  Fantastic!  The sand is so soft, almost like a powder.  I should point out that doing down was easy, getting back up in the soft sand, not so much.

I had to Jump another dune again.  The sand is so soft; you can’t get good purchase for a good jump.

Finally, after returning to the visitor’s center to use the facilities, I found a lizard.  There were all kinds of tracks in the sand, but no lizard.  Now I find it.

  

Leaving White Sands Dunes National Monument we headed to the US Army Missile Museum.  Here are some of the mountains we passed on our way.  

The only problem, when we got to the US Army Missile Museum they had closed it down because of a possible collapse of one of the rockets.  Whether that is true or not makes no difference, we didn’t get to go inside.  We couldn’t take pictures from outside the gate and they would not let us in. 

As we were driving back, we passed this flatbed, from Quebec, with these two aircraft wings.

We are now on our way to the Three Rivers Petroglyphs Site, which we’ll set as its own blog post.