High Altitude and Work Horses

Trip odometer 2689 miles.

Jan 21: From Texarcana (for those of you tracing our route) we crossed a big hunk of Texas, including Learn, Hooks, New Boston, DeKalb, Avery, Clarksville, Detroit, Reno, Paris, Sherman, and Gainesville. We made camp at the LBJ Grasslands on the Tadra Trailhead. We had called the Forest Service that morning just to be sure we were heading to the right camp spot (there are lots) and the kind gentleman told us what we needed to know, and then excused himself, as he had a fire to manage. Sure enough, about an hour or so from LBJ Grasslands we saw the smoke. It was a controlled burn, but I guess there have been some wildfires recently in the area.

Jan 22: LBJ Grasslands was a place we could have easily stayed for another day or two, but we were still on a tight schedule to get further across the country. The next day we passed through Alvord, Barrie, Vashti, Windhurst, Archer City, Megargel, Throckmoprton, Haskell, Roby, Snyder, La Mesa, Seminole, and then into New Mexico and Hobbs and landed in Carlsbad.

We had a bit of a nailbiter finding gas at one point. When we finally got to a gas station we put in 24.5 gallons into our 25 gallon tank. Whew! Carlsbad was another just-passing-through town. It was getting pretty dang cold in the evenings, so we found a unique place to stay amidst all the hotel chains in the city.

This felt like a very Alaskan experience. The rooms were all what looked like pre-fab storage containers – what you might see a construction company install on a job site for a long term construction gig. And it did seem that most of the folks there might have been working on nearby hotel construction. All the other guests were gone by 7:30.

Jan 23: Out of Carlsbad we passed the salt flats and Guadeloupe National park, then entered Texas again and had to pass through El Paso. I hope to never have to drive through El Paso ever again in my entire life. Traffic (and computer guidance through it) was absolutely awful. No doubt we earned a few new gray hairs getting out of that city.

And it was in El Paso that we first experienced traveling so close to the Mexico border. I mean, here we were at a stoplight in El Paso, and Juarez was just over there. The contrast was stark. I regret not having a picture to help tell the story, but, as you now know, the stress of navigation overtook the documentary narrative at this point.

Moving past El Paso we travelled parallel to the Mexico border. We crossed back into New Mexico and and through Columbus, Hachita, Animus, and finally Rodeo. Most of the cars (trucks, actually) that we saw on the road were Border Patrol. At different points on the road, a truck would be parked with some sort of high-tech equipment in the bed, pointed at the border. The road was strewn with empty water bottles, and sometimes full bottles tied to a fence by some good Samaritan. At one crossroads, there was a fence that someone had decorated with items found from immigrant crossings: shoes, blankets, and the like. I was struck by two things I saw on the fence: a child’s backpack and a teddy bear.

Once we got to Rodeo we stayed at the fabulous Rusty’s RV Ranch. Amid the hundreds of RV parks we’ve passed, Rusty’s is something special. First there’s Rusty’s Round Up, a nice community space that was blissfully warm when it the outside elements weren’t. Then there was Rusty’s menagerie of exotic birds, goats, and other oddities. This is dark sky country – a place where folks flock to haul out their telescopes to look at a night sky not faded from lights. In fact, there were stern warnings throughout the park that one would be asked to leave if they were putting out too many lumens.

But the big draw of getting to Rodeo is that it was just a few minutes drive over the border to Portal Arizona, and our dear friends Becky and John!

Portal is right at the entrance to Cave Creek Canyon, which is all kinds of beautiful. It is one of those birder’s life-list kind of places, and we saw plenty of birders swooning about. It is about 5000 ft altitude at the base of the mountains. There had been a snowstorm three days before, and plenty of snow remained in the shady parts of the canyon. We spent our days hanging out and hiking with Becky and John, and our nights back at Rusty’s in the cold, cold camper. We spent five full days in Portal before continuing West.

One thing we both agree on is that we are looking forward to a slower pace of travel once we get to San Diego. We have some urgency to meet some of our Alaskan family there, but it has meant driving longer hours and passing by places and things that we would normally spend some time getting to know. Still, even at this pace we’ve managed to pack in some great experiences. In the next days, we will catch up with some other Alaskan family in Bisbee AZ, Tucson AZ, and get ever closer to our goal of reaching the West Coast!