The aircraft collection is impressive.  The guide’s banter makes a walk through tour educational and fun.  We grabbed lunch at their café, The Flight Grill, and we pretty pleased with our choices; deliciously seasoned chicken noodle soup and a sonoran hot dog.

The dog had everything on it, bacon, pickles, tomato, green chili sauce, onions, mustard…check it out.         

Morning greets us with a clear blue sky and a fantastic view across a calm lake. It looks about perfect.  I step out for a stroll and am hit with the stink of escaping gases from the dozens of gas wells that dot the land around the lake.  I suppose it is different for the person who is profiting from the wells but it spoils the place for me.  I’m not sure I want to return.  What a bummer.  We head out this morning.

It’s just the wind!

We are camping on a bluff above Lake Meredith and as we went to bed we were still dealing with the high winds that have been with us our entire stay.  Around 11PM, in a total of about 15 minutes, our 35 mph gusts out of the southwest became 25+mph gusts out of the north.  It bounced us around quite a bit.  It wasn’t long before windows slid closed and covers came up.  The temperature dropped 20 degrees or more too.  It wasn’t the most peaceful night’s sleep but we are definitely tired of 95F plus days and look forward to highs in the 70s and low 80s for a few.

Take a couple dozen highly energetic kids, train for hours and hours, create intricate/brightly colored costumes and introduce a hypnotically engaging drum beat; the result is a wonderfully entertaining dance performance. They demonstrated new Pow-Wow age dances as well as those rooted in the ancient Pueblo cultures.

Kent couldn’t resist when a lovely young Indian maiden asked him to join the circle dance.  Unfortunately there is no photo evidence but I can say that he certainly seemed to enjoy himself.

Of course we could not resist a visit to an RV museum. Units date back as far as a 1921 canvas car top called a Kampkar made by Anheuser Busch and designed to fit a Model T.  Cool beginnings.  Old Airstream and Winnebago are here of course; as well as a number of lesser known names that have come and gone.  We have gotten softer over the years but they crammed a lot of niceties into these old units too.

Amarillo Museum of Art;  The big draw for me is the small Georgia O’Keefe collection. Just as we get inside what do we se see?  A sign stating that the O’Keefe works are out on loan.  Rats.  Well we are here now; let’s check it out any way.  In gallery one, we are met with swirling shapes and shadows from the suspended, lighted Mylar mobiles of Larry Bell.  Paintings of the mobiles line the walls but the mobiles themselves are much more engaging.  A three story work by Gabriel Dawe, using tightly strung colored string fills the center atrium.  We spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how all those straight lines could result in this rainbow, curvilinear shape.

Gallery II houses a collection of miniature pastel landscapes created by C. F. Reaugh. Pieces are just 5 or 6 inches across and often use just hints of shapes and lines but convey wonderfully complete images.  It is pretty amazing.

Round out the visit with a look at what must be a permanent collection of ancient stone carvings of deities and their consorts.

No O’Keefe but still an interesting stop.

Cadillac Ranch. OK, not exactly a museum but it is a fun stop.  Check this out, a row of cars buried up to their door frames at a very specific angle (matches Cheop’s pyramid) in a sorghum field.  Besides the setting; well, and the subject matter; the unusual thing is that at this art installation you are expected to touch and leave your own mark on the work.  Empty spray paint cans scattered all around provide evidence that this is an opportunity many can not pass up.  We are without paint so maybe next time

Access to the Alibates Flint Quarry National Monument is limited to guided tours.  At first that seemed unreasonable but once we got there it is easy to see why.  It would take a pretty careful eye to get much out of this place on an unguided walk through.  Thanks to our wonderfully informed and well spoken Ranger, we learned quite a bit.

This place is all about the flint . Not just any flint, beautifully colored, exceptionally tough, Alibates flint.  Thousands of years ago silica laden volcanic ash (from the very volcano site we visited just days ago) blanketed the dolomite rock that covered this area.  Water leached the silica into fissures and porosity of the dolomite and viola, over a few more thousands of years, the material was agatized and this beautiful flint was born.  More time passed and erosion exposed the flint allowing some of the earliest humans on the continent  to find it.

Ancient Flint Quarry

That is the geological back story that sets the stage for the archeologists who are attempting to reconstruct the impact of this find on human populations from the Paleo times through present day. There are Clovis spear tips and arrow heads used for hunting.  Scrapers, diggers and shapers used for everyday tasks.  The site was littered with all sorts of non-local items gained through flint trade with distant tribes. To we untrained observers the story here is built from somewhat patchy evidence but it mirrors that told at other flint and obsidian sites across the country.  Take the tour, it is worth the walk.  It is pretty amazing that something as simple as a rock can shape the course of history.

Thousands of years from now archeologists will be puzzling over the odd shaped, translucent red vessel found deep in a volcanic crevasse. Is it a cocoon or egg of an alien insect creature?  A time capsule?  The scat from a here-to-for unheard of creature?  Nope, it just the water bottle that escaped from the backpack pocket of this clumsy explorer.  It never even bounced but fell right to the bottom of a narrow, deep crevasse where there was no hope of retrieving it.  Drat.

Volcanoes shaped this place. Some of it as recently as 3000 years ago.  At first glance you’d think; why would we need to preserve or protect this rugged useless land?  Well, look a bit closer.  It is pretty amazing.  El Malpais, the badlands, is contained within a National Monument and National Conservation Area.

Soot black, fractured flows of basalt reach across the flat lands edged with soaring sandstone cliffs. From above it is a foreboding landscape of cracks and sinks and heaves.

Close up along the Lava Falls Trail it is still pretty daunting but with careful footsteps it is great to explore. We step over deep crevasse, skirt huge sinkholes, follow the path of curved flows of pahoehoe lava, and tread purposefully through the jumbled plies of rock that are fractured a’a lava.  There is an amazing natural amphitheatre formed when cooling lava puffed like rising bread in a ring around older cool lava and created a sort of bowl.

Our boots crunch on first black then red cinders that radiate out from El Calderon, the Cinder Cone that spewed out bits of the then molten rock some 115,000 years ago. Molten rock flowed too leaving miles of lava tubes explore (if you are into that sort of cavy thing!).  Keep in mind that a huge colony of Mexican free tailed bats calls this place their summer home.  Collapsed tubes form trenches and bowls and sinkholes.  Liquidy lava squeezing up through cracks forms odd humps and ridges.  Lichen and ferns, pinon pine and juniper grab a tenuous foothold and create the habitat for a surprising number of animals.  Like lava fields we have seen before, this is a very cool place.

So how do they know this lava is 3000 years old? Scientists usually determine the age of rocks through Argon decay to potassium (you knew that, right?).  Well, it was news to me.  Anyway, that won’t work for this flow because it isn’t accurate for rocks younger than 5000 years.  Enter method two, measurement of C14 decay to nitrogen in entrapped plant material.  I have heard of that test and it says this lava emerged 3,600 to 3,200 years ago.  Check out an even cooler test; the impact of cosmic rays on materials on the surface of the earth results in a build up of He3 in that material.  The longer it is around the more He3, of course….  This test says the lava is 2,500 years old.  I guess that is close enough for hand grenades and atomic aging formulas.  They declare it 3000 years old.

Trogloxenes, troglophiles, and troglobites: oh, my

Those are the classes of critters found in caves. Good to know but I’m not planning on checking them out!

In this broad, arid valley just west of Albuquerque El Moro National Monument preserves a wondrous site.   Fresh water pools year-round at the base of a towering sandstone bluff. Water and wind through the eons have carved away the center of the monolith leaving a shear-walled box canyon that is lushly green compared to all around it.

It is no surprise that this place has been a stop over for humans for hundreds of years. Atop the cliffs we see ruins of Ancestral Puebloan community, Atsinna, built over 800 years ago.  Their petroglyphs can still be seen along the cliffs.  The site proved inviting to many more travelers.  Thousands of carved inscriptions litter the faces of the sandstone headland proving the passing of Spanish explorers and gold seekers in the early 1600s and evidence of wave upon wave of early American westward moving pioneers.  What a magnificent example of the ever present human need to leave a lasting mark on this world we live in.

The trail to the top is worth the effort. Views are fantastic and rock formations amazing