Blogs from Soccoro, New Mexico, United States, North America
August 16th 2010
My rest day is now nearly over, but I have received words from some of the others out in the heat of the day. At the moment, the USA is suffering the most days over 100 deg F since 1980!! There is building storm type conditions in the Southern States (Bugger that's where I am headed) Also as I write New York is bracing it's self against a low coming in.... I will leave Socorro early in the morning and head down to the Carlsbad Caverns and then make my way down to Harlingen, pretty much as far south as you can go in Texas, to catch up with Curtis, who I met on my first sortie to South America in 2005. So until the next up date, stay cool, Rosco. From Robin Hood and Friar ... read more
Durango, Co to Socorro, NM
Published: August 2nd 2009North America » United States » New Mexico » Soccoro
August 1st 2009
Well, we sadly left Durango and started once again on our journey south to Texas. It was a beautiful sunny day and we saw the temperatures climb from 15C in Durango at 9 am to 36C in Socorro at 6 pm! The drive was uneventful though we did see some astounding things. We had some extra time to stop today so when we saw the turn-off for Chaco Canyon, we just had to go there. It is a canyon that had a Puebloan culture (Chaco Culture) and there were about 6 or 7 different pueblos all within communicating distance of each other in the canyon. All that are left is ruins but it's so very interesting. We stopped at the Visitor Center and looked through the museum and then had a delicious lunch that Ricci packed ... read more
November 14th 2008
Hello from Bosque. It was an easy day and 150 miles from Santa Fe to Bosque. I got settled in, picked up my rental car and made it to Bosque in time to watch an evening fly in. I only had to drive a little over a mile from the campground to the pond where I watched several hundred Sandhill Cranes arrive. Here are a couple of images from the evening. Hopefully I'll get up in time for sunrise and an early morning blast off.... read more
July 12th 2008
On this overcast day, we headed out into the desert to see the Very Large Array of radio telescopes used to search the skies. This is the same array featured in the movie contact with Jodie Foster. It's a set of 27 radio antenna that are arranged in 3 branches of 9. When spread out, each arm can spread 13 miles. A rather reluctant PhD student took us out and answered all of our questions. It was really impressive to see these massive things, built decades ago, that we're still using. They're just now getting updated with new computers and systems so they were all clustered near the visitor's center. When they move, it's quite unsetlling. After a couple hours there, we headed back to Soccoro to resume our trip west. We stopped at the same ... read more
