Heading Eastward - Old And New Roads
Crawling thru the urban throngs was utter misery. Wheeling thru the open desert was unalloyed joy.
I drove through the howling winds and plaster dinosaurs of Whitewater Pass, past Yucca Valley and Palm Springs and Chiriaco Summit. I drove until exhaused that first night, found a quiet spot off I-10 between Joshua Tree National Park and the Colorado River; I pitched my tent, watched stars, heard wind. I quickly discovered the the Jeep was NOT a 4Wd and was NOT suitable for driving into soft sand - luckily I avoided getting stuck. See my day 1 notes.
The roads I wished to follow for the rest of the trip were a mixed batch. I'd trod on some many times, often while hitchhiking in earlier days. Some were portions of old journeys I was now retracing. Some were brand-new to me. All in all, this was to be a trip into various pasts and an alleged future, scouting-out possible paths for future exploration.
The memories whiz by - buying books and drinking free sun tea at a used-book tent in Quartzite; numerous dust-devils near Phoenix; dark clouds pressing down over the Superstition Mountains; the near-ghost-towns of Miami and Globe.
Past the dry hills of the San Carlos Apache land, among cottonfields on the upper Gila River at Ft. Thomas, is a monumental park dedicated to a local boy who founded the Lions Club: rose gardens, a marble obelisk, sheltered picnic areas, and a shack housing the local amateur radio club.
Clifton AZ is a long narrow grey town in a long narrow red canyon, another almost-ghost village. Going east from there, I climbed steep lava flows into west New Mexico, topping-out in a landscape of rolling hills looking for all the world like the valley-oak woodlands of Sonoma County, but about a mile higher up. And those are big junipers, not oaks.
Thence along the Gila and Mogollon country, the edges of the southern Rockies, and into the village of Reserve, formerly the northernmost of the San Francisco Plazas, Elfego Baca country - but I saw no trace of that historical incident, or maybe I looked in the wrong places.
I crossed the Continental Divide's low hump and dropped into the vast Plains of San Agustin, site of the Very Large Array [VLA] of radiotelescopes. I stopped, I looked, but I didn't tour, because it was just too damn windy/cold.
So, down to Socorro in the Rio Grande valley, and across the Jornado del Muerto's [Journey of Death] volcanic wastes - rather pretty; and up into Lincoln County, home of Billy T. Kid and Smoky T. Bear and Ruidoso. Ruidoso hosts the richest horse races on Earth; the race tracks and ski lifts and pine forests in these Mescalero Apache Rockies are where rich Texans come to play when the weather's bad back home. Off season, it all looks somewhat implausible. Supposedly the fanciest resort here is The Throne Room Of The Mountain Gods. Nice name, eh?
I drove thru Roswell, but the only aliens I saw were French, German, Japanese... no that's a lie, it was midnight, Roswell's just another big city, so I kept going. I tried to sleep alfresco at roadside rests around Clovis, but it was just too damn cold for sleeping bag and air mattress; exhaustion sucks. See my day 3 notes.
Across Arizona
I found a BLM BackCountry ByWay, the old road connecting the farms of Safford in the Gila valley with the mountain mines around Clifton, and there I tried to pitch my tent. Rocky ground and high winds frustrated me, but somehow I survived the night. And the evening and the morning, the second day... See my day 2 notes.
Into New Mexico
