Borderlands

Driving north from El Paso, I passed a Border Patrol post with a huge blimp that is used to surveil the area from here to the border, looking for illegal migrants and contraband.  I had previously seen it way up in the sky and thought it was pretty creepy.  They must have it down for servicing.

Your tax dollars at work.  The sign says Tethered Aerostat Radar System.

In West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, I've seen quite a few large orchards of pecan trees.  Here they have to be irrigated to grow.  Since it's winter here, too, the leaves are off the trees.  The orchards go on for miles!

As everywhere in this country, mountains surround you.

I stayed at Pancho Villa State Park in Columbia NM, arriving in time to watch a sunset unfold.

The next day I headed for Bonita Canyon Campground at Chiricahua National Monument in AZ.  The Google Maps lady took me over a looooong dirt road over Apache Pass.  The road was in pretty good shape but it did worry me that we were winding higher and higher into wild mountains.  When I got to the Fort Bowie Historic Site and the road kept going, I was more worried.  But the Google lady did OK, the dirt road took me to paved roads again and it was the shortest way, as well as rugged and beautiful.  

My campsite was really hard to back into.  While I was struggling, a nice guy named Gabe offered to back in for me, and I gratefully accepted.  He was also camping there with his wife and two girls.  He admired my little Casita -- not big enough for all 4 of his family, but the kind of camper he'd like to have some day.  

Chiricahua National Monument protects an amazing valley of rhyolite formations.  (If my previous post said zeolite, my apologies.  Rhyolite is the kind of rock formed from ancient volcanic ash.)  When the ash comes pouring out of the volcano, it is very hot and tends to stick together forming the rhyolite.  Sometimes layers can cool at different rates, or the ash had chunks of other rock in it, making some layers softer than others.  Once the rhyolite rock has formed, it tends to crack vertically into hexagonal columns, which then weather slowly into the round formations seen everywhere at Chiricahua.

Can you see the outline of a man's face, lying down?  Cochise's Head.  Cochise was a skilled diplomat and preferred negotiation to war.  When he was wrongly accused of stealing and kidnapping, though, he did take his people to war.  The Army destroyed them.  

The campground only had that one night available, so I drove 20 minutes over to Coronado National Forest for a dispersed camping site the next 2 nights.  Dispersed camping in National Forests is free with no amenities.  In this case just a good dirt road winding into a grove of trees along a lovely stream and a big stone fire ring.

Lovely to hear the song of the stream from my camper.  This area was heavily burned in 1995.  Twenty-five years later,  vegetation has regrown, still revealing the blackened trunks of trees -- some of whom died and some who survived.  

I had heard from Frontera de Cristo, an organization in Douglas AZ I contacted, and they were willing to have me come volunteer, although they hadn't had time to determine what they would ask me to do.  From Coronada National Forest to Douglas wasn't far.

In this region, three mountain chains converge -- the Rockies, the Sierra Madre coming up from Mexico and  the Sierras from California.  Flora and fauna from all 3 ranges meet and mingle here.