Retired and on the go: Guadalupe Mountains, TX; Carlsbad Caverns, NM; White Sands, NM; Las Cruces, NM; Gila Nat. Forest, NM; VLA, NM

Hi everyone:

Time flies when you are having fun…..

Below some photos of our adventures in the South West of the US through May 22.

I am a little behind with my blogs. So there is more to come in the next few days. I am dependent on wifi connections which you don’t find here that often. Even cell phones don’t work very well in this desert area…..

This is the Nat. Park that has the highest mountain of Texas, appropriately named: Guadalupe Mountain.

We climbed it. Starting at about 1750m…

and summiting at 2667m

Our camper way down (the small one in the middle, top row)

Carlsbad, New Mexico; it has the largest caves in the Western Hemisphere; the one you can visit, The Big Room, is 30miles long

Taking photos inside the cave in low light is hard; this one gives you an idea of the enormous halls you find inside. Someone called it an underground Grand Canyon

They found another set of caves, not open to the public yet which is 100 miles long

B and I in one of the caves

An elevator takes you down 230m in 30 seconds

“White Sands” New Mexico; sand that consists of pulverized gypsum (gips for the Dutch)

Amazing all these white dunes

You can walk and drive through this area for miles….

The habitual picture to prove that we were there….

Some plants, a spiny yucca in this case, survive here

Las Cruces, NM; we visited with my old neighbors and friends Judi and Lance and had a Mexican dinner in a local restaurant (after all Las Cruces is right on the Mexican border). We all lived in Springfield, VA, just outside the Beltway around Washington DC in the mid-70s. Lance is a Kiowa Indian.

They have 2 sons whom I have not seen since they were little; one is a pilot, the other is the head soccer coach at Carnegie Mellon university (see link)

http://www.cmu.edu/athletics/intercollegiate-sports/mens-teams/soccer/head-coach.html

Lance showing off a set of eagle feathers still used during the annual Pow Wow; they belonged to his greatgrandfather (I hope I remember that correctly)

In front of Judi and Lance’s home in Las Cruces

Copper mine close to the Gila Nat. Forest

See what strip mining does to the mountains…..

Mule dear in the Gila National Forest, New Mexico

Start of our visit to the pre-Columbia cliff dwellings in
Gila Nat. Forest, NM

Overview of the caves

The dwellings were built and occupied in the 12th century

The native americans who built these cliff houses were the Mogollan Indians, ancestors to the Hopis, Zunis and Navajos.

Below various shots of the cliff dwellings which we could freely visit

VLA = Very Large Array: In the desert of New Mexico, you’ll find a series of 27 huge dish-shaped antennas that work together (the largest such setup in the world), to receive and analyze radio signals from outer space