Content including photographs are Copyright © 2009 - Don & Linda Gilmore
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Shown here -- Southwestern New Mexico.
First stop was Hatch, New Mexico -- the chili pepper capitol of the world. And to look at it they know what they're talking about. All the house roofs had chilis drying on them, and there was a bunch of stands selling chilli pepper ristras. What a deal too! Neat place in the desert.
This is an old Spanish arrastra that was used to crush gold ore and was powered by burros. The turned it and dragged a big heavy rock around the circle of stones to crush the rock.
The Desert Fairly Duster is quite common in this Southwestern part of New Mexico and is a very pretty flower. We saw them all along the roads.
A section of the road that goes to Silver City in the mountains in Western part of the state. This is a pretty desolate place and really quite beautiful.
Some of the mountain areas have some weird geology and really neat rock formations, like this one found on the way out of Silver City.
Another place along the road that caught our eye and had some beautiful colors in the rock formations. This is definitely high desert.
13 Pronghorn Antelope in a field next to the road. They seemed quite content to stay and eat, and weren't bothered by us at all. You can see by the fence how close they were to the road.
Then we caught this big ram in the field pretty close to one of the satellite dishes. I have at least a dozen photos of him and some of them were taken very close to him. I've heard they can run pretty fast; but these Pronghorn weren't interested in taking off.
This -- according to the sign; is the Very Big Array at the National Radio Astronomy. And it is very big! They were spread out for at least a mile and there was 40 or 50 of them. Quite impressive.
I'm guessing here that the railroad track was for moving and working on the Dishes. I would be interesting to know what they do here with all these dishes.
The size of these dishes is pretty amazing. That trailer sitting there is a normal height office trailer and it's sitting up on a foundation about 2 ft. off the ground. New Mexico is a place that you should go and spend some time -- more time than we spent there. We only saw a little bit of the Southwestern part of the state.
Have fun --------
