Just to make a correction, I took over 5,000 pictures on my journey not 3,000 like I mentioned previously.
Since I did not know how long it was going to take to get up to the top of Pike's Peak I planned on staying in Colorado for a second night down the road towards New Mexico to get a jump on the next morning of going to Albuquerque.
I knew I was going to go to Carlsbad Caverns on the second day in New Mexico so I planned on stopping in Taos and Santa Fe before getting to Albuquerque. And the plan actually worked for once! :)
Once in New Mexico there were just a couple of unplanned stops (the plan to Albuquerque mostly worked).
Before getting out of Colorado, I passed a sign on the highway for an historical site for the Ludlow Massacre. As I was heading into Indian country, I was expecting a site regarding a massacre of Indians or by Indians but to my surprise it wasn't about Indians at all.
In 1914, the coal miners were on strike against the mine operators. The miners and their families lived in cloth tents measuring 10 feet by 14 feet with wooded interior walls and floors and some had basements. Still living in Colorado it had to be bone chilling cold in the winter especially for the families who stayed above ground the entire time. Those men and boys going into the mines probably were warmed in the winter even being several hundred feet below ground.
During the strike the mine owners had the State Militia called in to watch over the miner's camp. April 19, 1914 was Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday. Both the working families and Militia participated in a feast and then dancing, singing and a baseball game . The next day most of the camp slept in after the festivities. But an explosion set off gunfire between the miners and the militia. Luckily a train stopped on the tracks between the firing groups so many of the women and children were able to escape into the hills. At dusk the militia attacked the camp and set fire to the tents. Four men, two women and eleven children were killed by the militia attack. The signage at the site has conflicting information about the overall number of dead - 1 place says 30 people lost their lives and another says 21.
This being a Miner's Union site, the information takes the slant of the union miners but from what happened it probably is not far from the truth. There is a monument to the men, women and children killed at Ludlow and some interesting signage. Still a tragedy and not what I expected when I went to visit the site. Which made it all the more interesting.
The first stop in new Mexico was this sign for the Santa Fe Trail. The trail led from Missouri towns to Santa Fe. And the big skies of New Mexico. I still remember these skies from when I first visited over 30 years ago. Still big and still beautiful!
The next stop was for a sign about Eagle's Nest State Park. What precipitated this stop was passing a ranch like sign for a center that reintroduces eagles back into the wild. This is a place that would be nice to come back to visit - but on we head for Taos.
Just outside of Taos, NM is the Rio Grand River Gorge or sometimes called the Grand Canyon of the Rio Grand. Not quite as grand as the canyon for the Colorado, but still an interesting formation especially if you can not make it to the Colorado version.
Backtracking towards the City of Taos is the Taos Pueblo. This village has been continually occupied for over 1,000 years. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site which is good and bad. It brings notoriety and money but it also limits the amount and type of work that can take place to the buildings. No growth, just maintenance on existing structures with the same methods and materials of the original constructi0n.
Taking the short tour provided an interesting insight to some of the culture of the Taos people. Like many tribes they have a casino near the Pueblo. The inside of the dwellings have few furnishings as the dwellings are emptied during many of the festival days during the year. Fewer possessions makes emptying the dwelling for the festival days much easier. If someone marries out of the tribe, the new spouse is not allowed to learn the sacred language or participate in the sacred rituals and festivals of the Taos people even if the spouse is a Native American.
Many of the residents of the Pueblo are artists and they depend on visitors to buy their work. I met this wonderful wood worker named Water Crow who made benches of various woods. He would carve figures in the wood and fill the cracks and openings in the wood with ground-up rock dust. I bought this wonderful bench made of incense cedar with turquoise inlay.
Water Crow had another bench he was working on that was about 8 feet long, 12 inches wide and about 24 inches high. The carving was of the Pueblo village and other symbols. A fantastic piece of work. Glad it was too big to fit into the convertible. :)
The dark brown square of clay with straw sticking out is the wall of the church next to the doors. This is in contrast to the living sections of the village where the walls are not quite so brown and the underlayment is mud brick. From going into some of the dwellings to view artwork, they had small stoves but there were large outdoor ovens that were used for cooking as well.
Our last stop before Albuquerque was Santa Fe. Santa Fe is wonderful town full of artwork and galleries where you can buy museum quality pottery from the ancient Anasazi Indians to the most modern pottery and jewelry. It is much like Carmel, CA (pronounced car-mel unlike the Indiana version of Carmel) an upscale town but larger and a deep Indian heritage.
I like it because it snows in the winter but the snow does not stay long and it rarely gets to deep to drive safely. There are ski resorts nearby in the higher elevations where it certainly gets deep snow and cold winter days and nights.
Surrounding the area of Santa Fe are numerous Indian Pueblos, like Taos, that are filled with history and great works of art. The Nambe Indian Reservation is south of Santa Fe. There is where the Nambe kitchen wear was first created with metal mines in the hills on and around the reservation. Which in a bit of irony, I did not buy any of the kitchen wear while in NM. It is very good quality and you take it from the refrigerator right into the oven. My first day back the neighborhood was having a yard sale and I bought a $45 piece of Nambe wear for $3. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.
And how do you spell the capitol of New Mexico - Al... not Santa Fe. They have a very different capitol building from any other that I have visited. I expected an adobe building, but not a round building with no spire or tower. If someone had not pointed it out to me, I would still be wandering around the neighborhood looking for it. It does not look like a Capitol Building.
There were some interesting statues on the grounds. A modern Indian, the obligatory eternal flame to those who have died in the all too many wars of the world (but no mention of any of the many battles the Indians fought for their lives and lively hood from the earliest days of the Spanish conquest to the more recent US Calvary escapades). And finally a new topic for a statue - the Civilian Conservation Corps.
I saw other statues to the CCC later in my trip, but this was the first one. An interesting aside is that all of the CCC monuments I saw, all of them showed the CCC worker with out a shirt on. A curious observation but even curiouser of why they all go topless. Just one of the many wonderments of my journey. It may be due to the same artist creating the monuments that I saw or it could be that this is the way the CCC is always portrayed - hard working and shirtless. Makes you wanna go - hmmmm.
Here we are at Albuquerque. Home to a Hot Air Balloon Festival every October. They have over 600 Hot Air Balloons at the festival. It is quite a site from the pictures and video I have seen of this festival. It is definitely worth a trip to Albuquerque too see this festival in person. The KOA where I stayed said they have a very long waiting list for any site during the festival. Which is interesting in that the balloons take flight at 4 in the morning and are internally lighted which means that people attending the festival must sleep from 6 PM to 3 AM to get up and in place to watch the launch. Definitely on my bucket list of places to see.
Thanks for riding along, tomorrow we visit alien worlds, both fact and fiction.
Michael
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