 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
You absolutely sure this is Texas? (at the time this was $0.60 higher than norm!)
|
|
|
|
Day 14 7:30 AM Sonora, TX. Cold, 38 degrees. The sun has not come up yet. I-10 headed west. When I made my plans for the road trip to get to Mesa, Arizona for a Saturday morning jeep run with the local jeep club, I forgot to take into account that we had to cross the entire state of New Mexico to get to AZ. So… I shift into driving mode, I have not been in this mode yet on this Odyssey! Driving mode is when you get a rest stop, food and stretch only when the Jeep needs gas, at 12 MPG that happens more often than I wish! This is the way I pictured Texas to be, desert, scrub-like terrain. We just started seeing yucca cacti. A little further west and the highway cuts into limestone hills. It’s great when you can see the striation of the limestone where it has been cut through for the road. I figure, there should be caves and caverns in an area with all this limestone. In fact in the cutouts you can see the beginning of caverns. Where water has worked its way down and started to erode pockets out of the limestone. When they built the road they cut through the hills and exposed the pockets. We start to see road signs for tours of caverns!! It is starting to get windy a head wind. I figured this out when… I am behind an 18 wheeler (read that Big Truck) I catch up (drafting). I pull into the next lane to pass. And need a lot more gas pedal, when I get parallel to the cab all forward motion in excess of the truck speed stops! So windy in fact that at 70 MPH I can no longer pass an 18 wheeler. So I settle in behind one (since I am drafting my MPG goes up from 12 to ~ 15 MPG. Later we are in areas that are rather flat and arid with occasional mountains poking up from the flat ground. Some of the mountains are quite jagged and others are soft and eroded (When I say mountains, it depends on your point of reference, these are between 1000 and 2000 ft. in height.) I find it quite striking that there are no foothills associated with these mountains. It is flat desert land, and BOING! There is a mountain. Off in the distance you can see a mesa with fuzzy white poles on top. As we get closer it gets clearer that the poles are electric wind turbines! A whole farm of them, the entire mesa rim is covered with them! Must go on for 10 -15 MILES of wind turbines! We come to the town of Sierra Blanca it is quite obvious where it got its name as there is one mountain that is strikingly paler than the other mountains around it. None of the mountains appear to have any kind of living material on them. AHHH the end of Texas is in sight. I see El Paso. Today I have driven almost 4 times the length of Massachusetts! That was only about ½ of the way across Texas! El Paso is a U shaped town with mountains filling the U. It’s also right on the border of Mexico in fact from I-10 you can see the Rio Grand river just down to the left. The river is so sucked dry that you can walk across it to Mexico without getting your feet wet! They must expect some serious rain in El Paso, the catch basins and dry washes are HUGE! I saw one catch basin that had to be 15 acres with a 12 ft dike! We spent an hour at Kinko’s in El Paso trying to get them to follow through on a business card order from the Fort Worth Kinko’s NEW MEXICO!!!! Just after you enter New Mexico if you look off to the right, you will see a mountain where the rock striations are swirled around. It is odd to see this on a mountain-sized scale. Only two other places have I seen anything like this. One was across the San Juan River from Mexican Hat, Utah (the formation not the town). The other place was in Idaho it was not visible from a paved road. I stumbled across it by taking a jeep trail up into the mountains where across from a large hollow I saw a rock face several thousand feet high where the strata was folded like toffee. Next stop Las Cruces. One of the Jeeping capitals of the world! We will be baaaaack!
|
|
|
