The bounding piles of white

8. the sheetrock-white sands of the Tularosa Basin

From the westernmost highway passes of the Sacramento Mountains we could see the twinkle of white gypsum sands huddled in the great expanse of the Tularosa Basin in South-Central New Mexico.







Gypsum is unique in that it dissolves in water. In most instances it ultimately flows with the watershed to the sea, but in the case of the Tularosa Basin, the gypsum carries down from the the Mountains and is trapped between the San Andreas and the Sacramento ranges with no running river to ride seaward. So the Gypsum settles in desert lakes which annually sun-dry. It crystallizes jagged formations in the dry desert lakebeds, weathering breaks the crystals down into sand and the strong winds carry the sand to form dunes. The dunes perpetually shift and change shape, some shifting as much as 30 feet in a year.




Corey and I walked barefooted over the white among the pale lizards, the yellow blooming yuccas, the grasses, and black beetles to our inter-dunal campspot. The sun fell and the sand cooled. The awkward quality of lightedness distorted space and perception as we climbed up and bounded down the dunes. The dune peaks bled into the clouds and any sense of direction was governed by the Sacramento ridges visible to the east. The moon nearly full'd. The Whiteness of the sand , the few clouds, and the moonlight more bent our perceptions. What seemed 100 yards could be 30 feet. The dune horizons seemed to grow interminably as we climbed up and over them.



We camped in the approximate 75 square yard interdunal home of an endangered burrowing owl. We had set camp near its yucca root burrow. It flew about and stood the dune peaks sounding its sound of agitation most of the evening.



Some Grad students from Idaho were capturing the white dune lizards when we walked out to the truck on the morning of June 5th. “there are a species outside the dunes of a dark color, we clip their tales and do DNA tests, the white lizards adapted their white color to fit this microclimate in just 6,000 years.”



The Tularosa white sands also hold the military base and white sands missle range. Another post...

7. Carlesbad.



The Mammonstrous cavern sits below the earth in southeastern New Mexico in the Chihuahuan Desert right up against the Lincoln National Forest and the Guadalupe mountains. The cavern is one of the 113 caves in the National park formed from sulfuric acid eating away the limestone earth rock. The “Big Room” of Carlsbad show-cave is the 2nd largest chamber in the world—nearly 4,000 feet long, 625 feet wide, and it reaches up to 350 feet high.

The natural innards of the cave, the multitudinous formations, the vast heavenly chambers, the scale and presence of this place, though I did attempt, could not be reasonably presented in photograph form or any form for that matter other than a present moment. So I limit this documentation to the surrounding desert and the man forms in the bowels of one of the deepest limestone caves on earth.

Corey and I toured the park, the coral fossils, the Mescalero Indian remnants, the plantlife, wildlife, and touristlife.




We sat at the “natural entrance” to the cave in the later afternoon of June the 3rd. That wholesome afternoon yellow lay on all the stone, the prickly pear, and the faceted backs and bellies of the endlessly flapping cave swallows as they navigated in and out of the mouth devouring evening bugs and hollering chirps.



At the deep dark hole we waited, as did many others upon the amphitheater-like stone benches built at the mouth of the cave. We waited for the regular nighttime departure of the Mexican free-tailed bats. The Mexican free-tail is the most dominant bat species in the cave. The colony, according to the Q & A Ranger, sometimes reaches over a million bats. Guano mining in the early days of the cave had reduced the colony. He estimated that on our night we’d see 100,000. As the moment approached, any digital device (cameras, phones, video) had to be off’d to prevent disturbance of the bats echolocation.

The bats came. And it was a sight. You could watch and listen to them twist up cloudily in thousands from the deep entrance then flick off over a desert shrub and sand hill to begone. Or you could stare at the rising swirl indirectly, abstractly, and the rhythm of their action would create a mirage much like the distant flicker of black-asphalt-highway-heat. The flowing spectacle lasted nearly an hour.

The professional photo they have on the National Park Service Guide:




We tent crashed in the public land of the bureau of land management near a wild cave in the desert. The next morning, we walked down the 80 story deep entrance and self-toured Carlesbad. For the 1st half hour or so sunlight fingered in from the entrance to the depths. Then all light was unnatural and minimal. People carried their own headlamps and flashlights to browse as they chose.



From Carlesbad we headed northwest through more Lincoln National forest and the Sacramento mountains to The White Sands National monument. We saw earth eating devices and got a little tour of a deep mountain man's taxidermy studio.

6. Texas
We crossed the line in the late afternoon and stopped for water and toilets at the comfortable reststop on I-40 with state-shaped bbq grills and vistas. We woke to the eroding red dirt and deer hoof trodden Palo Duro Canyon, The 2nd largest canyon in north America I was told. Spiders, inching worms, and monumental painted canyons.



Highway 27 carried us south from Amarillo out of the panhandle into the vast flat of the central plains. No road kill to speak of, only an occasional alfalfa field.

We headed toward New Mexico from Lubbock (the home of texas tech U.). Highway 27 carried through little beaten towns of pecan groves, cotton fields, and peanut groves. They looked as worried as Gary, IN. Rust, empty weed lots and abandonment.

As we neared the border of New Mex. and the town of Hobbs, oil companies and refineries assumed control of the land. A monstrous Excel energy plant stood to the north and hundred of pendulating pumps to the south.

5. Oklahoma

Grand lake O’ the Cherokees camp-spot just across the Missouri border off I-44 in Northeast Oklahoma. They call it a lake when really it’s a man-lake on the Grand River. The Pensacola Dam was built in the late 30’s with depression labor as Roosevelt worked to alleviate the plummets of Hoover. Modern American humans insisted on living in the floodplain of the Grand River and when natural cycles continually flooded the banks, the grand river had to be curbed for comfort. The Dam created a 46,500 acre reservoir with 1300 miles of shoreline. It stands the largest multiple arch damn in the world. I’m not sure how the Cherokee fit in other than getting power from the hydroelectricity. Today it’s big on water sports, bass fishing, golfing, and car camping.

Hagleberg and I car-camped next to a nature center with rabbits roaming, a raccoon, and a caged skunk “with all her stink parts removed, of course,” the fellow in the john deer cart told us as he dropped off a bundle of wood. He sold wood bundles to accumulate funds for his 6-year-old daughter’s college.

A guy and wife and daughter camped across the way. He rev’d his car every half hour so he could keep his coldplay, dave mathews, and jack Johnson songs repeating without running the battery dumb. At 2am he fought with his wife then turned the music up full.

The Barbed wire room was the subtle highlight for the freshly built National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in OK city. They also had some stuffed animal heads, a western movie display, a rodeo room, countless cowboy exhibits, and a recreation of the early American western town that every early American museum and craft fair seem to utilize with the black smith shop, the stables, the steeple, etc. They had very little on the Native Americans.

Then came forth the home of Garth B.

And finally the free 72oz steak, Texas, the desert, and the Palo Duro Canyon.

Missouri Caves & Dilla

Our first night out from Indiana. Hagle B and I made camp in the hot humid river valley where the Meramec runs quick and clear through Missouri cave country. The night guy at our little campground allowed us to camp on the gravelly bank and told us about some wild caves in the area. He gifted us glow sticks for sticking in the cave mud to mark our routes.

The next morning we hiked into forest instead of the Meramec Caverns show cave. Our 1st cave (in Meramec St. Park) had heavy abuse--broken stalag.’s, beer cans and filthy underwears in mud. The second ran much deeper / muddier and huddles of hanging bats irked little wispy chirps at the shine of our headlamps.



Down the highway, Hagle and I stopped off I-44 at Fantastic Caverns, a “show” cave just north of Springfield, MO. “The only drive through cave in America,” and according to our tour guide, “the only cave with a movie theater.”

We rolled through Fantastic caverns in a red adorned jeep with a guide, a couple from Texas, and an empty 40’ trailer with sitting benches. The place had some interesting history—a speakeasy in the 30’s, a gambling sneak-spot, and in the 50’s a Saturday night music venue with, at times, an excess of 1000 humans drinking and dancing. The whole grab of the cave is the fact that it is this or it is that, “a drive through cave, the only one in North America,” “the only cave with a built in movie theater.” The autos made the drive accessible to everyone, effortless to everyone, indefatigable to all. You need $25 and the willingness to duck your head a few times when the rock roof is a little low.


Missouri was pleasant. 6,470+ discovered caves in the state, the heavy rolling green forests, the Mark Twain Nat., a hint of the Ozarks, and all those dilla. The incessant roadkill of deer, foxes, box & snapping turtles, coyotes, squirrel, hawks, waterfowl, rabbits, and many many armadillos testify to the abundance of wildlife in the area.



There had been, in what is now the U.S., a creature coined a glyptodont, or a giant armadillo, something like the size of a volks beetle. According to the overkill theory to the extinction of large mammals, this beast vanished from the earth when Homo sapiens arrived to the continent about 13000 years ago. Unfortunately, my only encounters with those little prehistoric tanks have been postmortem, on the roadside or the standing taxidermy’d one I regretfully failed to purchase at a shop back in western Illinois.