Monday, October 28, 2013

Birding Intro

Got to chatting with a couple of serious birders at breakfast the other day. They invited me to go birding with them Monday morning (today). Apparently Steve and Nancy Z. lead birding groups regularly at Cataina State Park in Tucson, and have birded all over the country. Yup, serious and knowledgeable birders. Little did I know just how serious and knowledgeable.

The destination of choice today was the Holy Trinity Monastary at St. David, Nevada, just a few miles down Hwy 80. Much of their property along the banks of the San Pedro river is maintained as a bird habitat. So off the three of us go, binoculars in tow. By chance we meet another birder, Deb, from Colorado, who also had a spotting scope. (Apparently the brand of choice for birding optics is Swarovski Optik.)

The birding started in the parking lot next to a pond. Birds were in view almost immediately. Observations about shape, color, bill and beak shape and color, flight patterns, song, call or cry, started flying around my ears and eyes. Nancy showed me almost instantly the bird book listing for each species we saw. I was generally playing catch up, where, where?? The three of them would all point their binoculars at a certain spot, so I'd get the general idea, and look there too. Sometimes, I'd actually see the bird. Deb's spotting scope came in handy for birds too far away to see in detail. I did see a lovely cardinal first. I was very proud. Cardinals are bright red and stand out like a fire engine! They were all three very gracious and helpful to a birding newbie tagalong.

Part of our walk was through a dense old growth cottonwood woods. Although we didn't get a good look at them, we startled what they agreed were two large owls. The discussion about what species they could have been was lively.  I just listened, having been duly impressed merely by their silent flyby. We were trying to be stealthy through the undergrowth, looking probably like a bunch of Groucho Marx immitators. Suddenly they all snatched their binoculars from their chest harnesses up to their faces, and all looked in unison to one location in the woods.  I couldn't see what they were looking at, but their unanimous choreography was priceless.  They excused me for bursting out laughing.

What a great introduction to birding. I had the priveledge of being in a very small group, the rest of whom knew whereof they spoke, they were very kind, and I had a wonderful time. Just might have to try this pursuit again in the course of my wanderings.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Forty Days and Forty Nights

 You may have noticed a dearth of blog posts from me lately. There are several reasons for this. The primary reason is that I have ventured into the murky side of wandering. In some ways the novelty of new sights, great hikes, and constant change has worn off.

I reached the end of my travel plan this last Monday. After October 21, 2013 there is no plan. I am what the RVers call “fulltiming,” i.e. living in my motorhome with no other place to live. For a number of years I’d thought about, wished, and hoped to fulltime. However, the vision always involved traveling with a partner. That relationship has met its ignominious and lamented end through unconscious as well as intentional neglect.  Ah well, pick me up, dust me off, soon to realize that a golden opportunity to do what I had always wanted had presented itself, albeit in a significantly different guise. Off I went, and you can read about those adventures in the earlier posts of this blog.

But now comes the hard part. What does it mean to wander? Why is there such a significant Wanderer archetype present in our human psyche? What makes “home?” Do we ever really “choose” our home? What do Wanderers bring to the table of human understanding?

Think of Marco Polo and his brothers! Those guys really set out to wander. They all thought he’d died. Surprised the heck out of ‘em when he reappeared. I am but a mere, pale inkling of that kind of wandering. I have the instant communication of the internet, and I can fly anywhere in a day if I need or want to.  I’m certainly experiencing no privations whatsoever. Grocery stores are everywhere. I even have a wine cellar, six bottles!

Some of my urge to wander has to do with physical geography. The USA is a land of stark and extreme contrasts of very large proportion. As I grew up in another, very small country, my childhood ideas of the USA were always distant, mysterious, inaccessible, strange, and sharply filtered by our subscriptions to Time Magazine, National Geographic and Christianity Today. I don’t think I’ve ever completely outgrown that particular childhood vision. Basically, I’d still like to figure this place out.

Unlike Marco Polo we know what to expect when we wander about in the country. There are no more frontiers, despite the Arizona nostalgia for Frontier that shapes the self-concept around here. The maps are now all accurate, even extremely precise. We have GPS. There still is the unassailable desert, however, a harsh and forbidding but beautiful environment, ever so ready to impersonally and uncaringly kill the unwary and unprepared.

More of the urge to wander is, I think, a desire to identify and rescue parts of my true Self.  It has been gently pointed out to me that the vast majority of my adult life I have spent partnered. I have taken precious little opportunity to become aware and comfortable with me, myself, and I.  I have residual distrust of this endeavor, coming from the Christianity Today model of things. However, I find myself yearning for a better, deeper understanding of myself, even though this psychic endeavor is not to be rushed, or engineered upon demand. I wait patiently for snippets of understanding, a dream with meaning, a flash of a further question, an arrow pointing toward new awareness. The desert environment is traditional for this kind of growth. I can understand why.

This “after the plan” time has been unique in another way. I have been as sick as I ever remember being, with a severe case of sinusitis. It has been a ten day bout of pretty good misery right front and center in the old head. Oceans, oceans, I tell you, of yellow stuff, not to put too fine a point on it. Mounds of damp, soggy Kleenex accumulate everywhere in my motorhome. I have had to sleep sitting up the past two nights, just to be able to breathe. Mind you, this is in no way life threatening, or permanently damaging (I am quite on the mend today) but I find it curious that my body should hit me like a ton of bricks in this way precisely at this uncertain, liminal time in my life. I am quite rarely sick, and reflecting on this period of illness will I think, have more to tell me as I proceed.

In my fitful night sleep in the desert, I am quite often made aware of the cross-country freight trains rumbling and whistling off in the distance, chugging up toward the nearby Continental Divide, or deadheading (I imagine) back West toward the coast. I am given to understand that no two train whistles are exactly alike. I don’t think my tonal memory lasts that long, but in my recent experience, it is likely to be true. Anyway, I think about these trains, who is driving them, how do they stay awake across the vast, dark desert, what are they carrying? They are carrying stuff. Maybe cars, cows, commodities, containers from ships, coal, chemicals. Okay, I’ll stop with the alliteration, but you know, stuff. (If you’ve never seen George Carlin riff on stuff, I recommend you search it out quickly on YouTube.)

All this is to say that I am also reworking my relationship to my stuff. Living in a <200 sq. ft. motorhome, in which I have absolutely everything I need as well as lots of things I don’t use, makes me aware that I have a curious attachment to stuff that defies complete understanding. I have no room to put more stuff. This has put a screeching halt to the “shopping as entertainment” phenomenon. I am curious to see what effect this stuff diet will have, should or when I settle back in to a “stick house” of some sort.

If you’ve read this far, you have gotten the idea that lots is going on, and you’d be right. Therefore I’ve decided to give myself the wonderful opportunity to take a Forty Days and Forty Nights period of time to just sit with myself and all of this, and see what comes of it. Not often in life does one get such a chance to do this. I intend to make the most of it in the next six weeks or so.


I’ll have more of the fun type wanderings to tell you about too. Next destination is Bisbee, Arizona, a quirky mining town with much to recommend it. My campsite will be at the lip of the Lavender Pit Copper Mine (now inactive) at the edge of Bisbee. We’ll see what contemplative thoughts arise at that location. Stay tuned!

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Family time

My DB (Dear Brother) has agreed to fly to Albuquerque, then help me drive to Tucson where my SIL (Sister In Law) will be joining us, all to visit the new DGD (Dear Grand Daughter), the DD (Dear Daughter) and her spouse. We will be taking a side trip to the Taos mountains to visit a high school friend of DB's, known hereby as PF. Got all those acronyms? And how did these acronyms come into blog usage?  I think people are cautious about mentioning people by name, so we'll use the acronyms for now.

There's a scenic byway to Taos called "The High Road to Taos."  Humph, should have paid attention to a name like that! Anyway, all's well. PF lives at about 8000 ft. elevation, in an off-grid house he has built over the years. Seriously off-grid. You get there by a 1 1/2 mile  muddy, rutted Forest Service road. Fortunately the mud was dry, only ruts. These Lazy Daze can go anywhere. This area outside of Taos is old Spanish Land Grant territory. The cemetaries are full of names like Sanchez and Lopez, and these families have been in the area for 400 years! Incredible.

We stayed two nights at PF's property. PF gave us a good back roads, insider tour of the area through Taos and the Rio Grande Gorge. There are some beautiful BLM campgrounds along the river that I now know how to get to for next time.We made dinner for two nights, something that was appreciated, I think, by the back country crew that showed up to enjoy them.

The second night there, I was woken by thunder, lightening and rain.  Panic, of that special  night time variety ensued. Having seen the dried out mud ruts, I didn't want to negotiate wet mud ruts in the Lazy Daze. We hitched up pretty quick that morning and beat a hasty retreat back to paved roads.

To complicate matters, upon hitching and checking the turn signals, the right turn signals for the LD and the toad were not working. DB suspected a fuse, but we were unable to identify the culprit. Finally I  resorted to a phone call to one of the LD knowledge base folks, who was able to talk us through finding the problem 10 amp mini-fuse in the engine compartment fuse box. I guess you can blow this fuse if you make the wrong contact with the electrical pigtail between the motorhome and the toad.  Thanks, John! So now I know how to fix that problem if it happens again.

DB and I drove hard all day from the High Road to Taos, and camped in Demming for the night near the railroad tracks and a truck stop. Couldda just used the Walmart, oh, well.

I have many thoughts about our time with PF, but they're still unformed, and I think there are some privacy issues I need to be careful of, even though PF is off the Internet grid as well as the electrical, water, and septic grids. In many ways it was a very precious time to have with someone we knew in a land and time far, far away, and so long ago now.  If you're curious, and you see me in person, I can tell you more about it.  

Generator wars

Uh, oh, generator didn't fire up today. This is not good when one is dry-camped or boondocking. Got a reference from the Lazy Daze knowledge base to go see Ken at Cummins Diesel in Albuquerque. So, everything in my rig had to be stowed, the leveling jacks retracted, and off I went. I took surface streets instead of the freeway, much more interesting that way.

Sure enough, they were able to fit me in. Ken said it just sounded like the carbuerator, and he could take it apart and reassemble it for about an hour's worth of labor. Turns out there were rust particles in the carbuerator indicating that at some point there had been water in the fuel supply.

Moral of the story? Run the generator frequently.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Sandia Mountains Hike

So who knew I was turning into a hiker! Just love it! Very invigorating. Probably because it is windy cold up at 10,682 ft. even on a sunny day.

Looking East from an almost empty parking lot at the Sandia Crest trailhead. The views are spectacular in all directions, for 100 miles.


You would not be amiss in thinking this might be a good location for antenae, and you would be correct. A photo of only part of the antenae farm.


However, once out on the trail, you can see craggy vistas like this one.


And this one. Southeast Albuquerque is visible in the distance.


Wondered if anyone had ever made it out to this point.


Yours truly, not close enough to the edge to be concerned. There were, however, lots of edges! The green belt in the distance is the Rio Grande river. This day's hike was about 3 1/2 miles. Us same three hikers hope to do a 7 mile hike on Monday, another trail in the Sandia Mountains. Am I glad I got those trekking poles. Pray for my knees!  :-)


Mesa Verde NP, before the you-know-what

Met some friends in Durango for lunch, then on into Mesa Verde National Park, a not too bad drive. This time, we stayed in the actual National Park campground for two nights, and with a Geezer Pass the rate was half price. Just tried to link to the NPS.gov website, and the websites are shut down too. Boy, if this isn't ridiculous!

In any case, Mesa Verde became a National Park in 1906 in order to protect its cultural and architectural integrity. Good thing. It is now a World Cultural Site. One Ranger told me that in the late 1800s white ladies of the area would organize "jewellery hunting" parties. They would go out and look for indentations in the soil and dig up the skeletons of the Ancient Peoples and take their burial jewellry. Grave robbing, essentially. Yikes, I hope we've gotten past that kind of behavior. However those kinds of crimes live long in the memories of indigenous peoples. I can understand the distrust.

It was a harsh environment and a hard life in these cliff dwellings. The Ranger also told me their lfe expectancy was age 35, and the infant mortality rate was about 50%. This was in stark contrast to the figures in the dioramas at the visitors' center. They looked mighty pinkish-white, sleek, plump or at least well fed, and tall. In reality they must have been short, wiry and probably undernourished. They were all pictured wearing only loincloths, but its cold up there! I seriously doubt they all ran around in loincloths all the time. We need more realistic dioramas.

Despite some obvious restoration, the dwellings had an unmistakeable air of the ancient and unknowable. I think the Native American descendants of these cliff dwellers have a connection to the ancient ones, but it is almost impossible for a white person to grasp.


The skill and labor involved in building these structures is remarkable. They must have been very patiet people.

This photo gives a good idea of how deep into the overhanging cliff the dwelling village is built.


Other peoples of another time. I wonder what they'll say when they excavate our McMansion ruins?


Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Two National Parks in one day? Probably not a good idea.

Driving to Moab from the overnight Willie Nelson truck stop, it was an iMax sky of thunderstorms and rain showers in every direction. Mostly we dodged the rain. Just outside of Moab, whew, thinking we had escaped the worst of it, we got slapped by the tail end of the storm that had been following our route to the west. Hail! The size of peas! Driving rain! Windy! Sudden, and loud! Wish I had the voice recorder going, but was too startled and distracted to think that fast, and it was probably wise to keep two hands on the wheel at that point Fortunately no harm done, and it didn't last long.

Relieved, we pulled into the OK RV Park just south of Moab. Really cute park, off the noisy highway, but a really not level site. And my levelers aren't working, low on hydraulic fluid, I think. Much machinations with the manual leveling blocks, and finally I am somewhat level. Personally I'm not too concerned about precise level, but the absorption refrigerator really doesn't like to be out of level, and they're expensive to replace.

Moab is hopping, a real tourist spot, reminds me of Hwy 49, the Gold Country. Lots of shops, Jeep tour and float trip operators, and a really good outdoor store at which I purchased a set of trekking poles. All the older hikers are using trekking poles, don't you know. It really helps preserve the knees by distributing pressure and weight to the poles. You have four points of stability, not just two.

The next morning, driving through Arches National Park reminded me of Yosemite. Okay, not quite so crowded, but at the popular arch viewing sites, the parking lots were full, and I had to drive on.

An overview of the Moab Fault.



A live picture of the same Moab Fault.


Not an arch, but I'm calling that guy on the right Easter Island.


This formation is called the Three Gossips, but I think the Three Wise Men might be better.


This and following photos are from Canyonlands NP. Although this park is quite close to Arches, it doesn't get near the visitors. But in a way, it is more interesting geologically. The terrain is remote, diverse and forbidding. Within the park is the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River.  Both rivers are placid until they meet, then watch out! River rafters apparently love the rapids below. Could not see the rivers from the roads that were available for driving, however.

Canyonlands is perfect for the serious wilderness back country explorer and camper. Probably not going to happen for me. :-)




Being weary from driving all day, I enjoyed a steak sandwich and a piece of coconut cream pie for dinner at the local steakhouse, then got a goodnight's sleep.