Blue Sky in Alpine Texas

I was saying in New Mexico that what in every picture I wanted to take the sky seemed to dominate because in fact the sky seems to dominate there.
It is pretty much the same here. There is a lot of blue sky.
It was great to wake up to +13C (55F) this morning. The smell was different but it reminded me of winter morning in Africa.
...and yes I am actually posting a blue picture. Now, in this picture the sky does dominate.

It was just a lovely day. I love the modern day cowboys with big pick ups (backies in South Africa, utes in Australia) talking in front the the guitar store and the agave with its bloom stem still standing.

I saw a pyrrhuloxia, also known as grey cardinal. The picture does not do it justice. My pictures of birds never do them justice.

And the really neat way the imprint of the leaves all wrapped up together when they first grow stays on the mature leaves of the agave.

..... in other words: a simple beautiful day here in Texas.

"The Man who Killed the Deer" by Frank Waters

I recommend this book to anybody interested at all in First Nations issues in North America even if you do not want to get into the politics of it. It just deals with the daily life of a simple person.

It takes place among the Pueblo Indians and was written in 1942. Normally I would be reluctant to even go close to a novel about First Nations written that long ago but I promise you it is safe to go there. You will not have to cringe or grind your teeth.

I own two copies of it. One copy is water stained because it was the cheapest copy I could originally find. The second copy I picked up for a quarter even though it has what I think is a terrible cover. Honestly had it been the original cover I had seen I may not have bought the book. Goes to show the saying is true, "you cannot judge a book by its cover".

Here is an extract from the back of one of them: "Frank Waters' The Man who Killed the Deer stands with Black Elk Speaks as one of the finest books ever written about American Indian. A novel of a Pueblo Indian caught between the ritual ways of his tribe and the alien 20th-century world of the white man, The Man Who Killed the Deer is a story of a man who lives as a stranger in both."

First it is beautifully written and it is a beautiful story; second, from my point of view, it is a great book about somebody caught between their original culture and another world regardless of how they got there.

More about Alpine Texas

Alpine is turning out to really be a great little community. It has:
1 small municipal airport
1 award winning library (with a very good second hand bookstore)
1 great new and second hand bookstore
8 art galleries
6 banks
7 churches (active churches, not necessarily beautiful old church buildings)
1 coffee shop
1 movie theater
1 guitar store
1 record store (yes, an actual record and Cd store!)
1 hardware store
2 grocery stores
1 clinic
11 hotels and motels
1 very active human society
3 thrift stores
9 restaurants (counting mac donald and Sonic Drive In)
2 vets
and 1 taxi company (I have never seen the actual car/cars)

...and this is for a population of about six thousands. I think it is amazing.

Along the train tracks you also have the warehouse of the Big Bend Wool and Mohair Company (no outlet though).

And as I was saying there is also a train station for passenger trains. Here is the train station with passengers waiting.

 ..and here is the train blocking the road.

Since I couldn't cross the tracks to the main part of downtown I had lunch at this small eatery, and it was worth it. The food was delicious and I ended up talking with a young couple co-founders of a furniture design business in town. They were really neat young people and super friendly.

The downtown has several interesting older buildings.

Here is the record store.

The coffee shop in an old gas station I think.

A very cool old building right next to where I had lunch. Front:

 ...and back.

 The movie theater.

and the very nice bookstore.

 As you cans see I am spending some time in Alpine. I am just over 100 miles from Big Bend, but somehow I am stopping here anyway.

Balmorhea State Park Texas

The main feature of Balmorhea State Park is its natural warm water pool. Temperature of the water all year round is around 22C to 24C (72F to 76F). Unfortunately the day I as there it was just barely over freezing all day and I found the water too cold for this weather when I tried to go in. In fact the only creature in the water were ducks and fish.

It is a huge, beautiful deep pool.

The campsite was quiet and clearly built for summer camping with shelters to create some shade at each site.

After a cold night the local sparrows were trying to keep warm under the roof shingles of the shelters. They made quite a racket but there were fun to watch. You can see the frost on the shady side of the shingles.

Murals of Alpine Texas

There is much more to Alpine than the murals but I happen to have photos of them and no other photos.

Alpine is a very pleasant little town. Somebody I was talking to put a finger on it when they said: "It is not on a big interstate and it does not have a big plant or factory". Interestingly enough it has a train line and passenger trains stop here...but there is no way to buy a train ticket in town and you have to "go on line" to buy one. The train station just has a waiting room, weird! 

Anyway here are some of the murals. I particularly like the first one. The colours are so brilliant.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

After Las Cruces I spent a few days hiking in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. What a great place.

The Organ Mountains

I stayed a few days in Las Cruces New Mexico and even though it is a fairly big town it has the feel of a small town. Its best feature I would say is its proximity tot he Organ Mountains that you can see from town.

Roasted Green Chiles at the Local Grocery Store

Today I bought roasted green chiles at the local supermarket. I think they are chiles and not green peppers because they were a bit spicy, not a lot but enough to put them out on "green peppers" in my book.
They come in a plastic bag and honestly do not look super appetizing.

They look a bit better out of the bag but not a lot more.

But they are delicious!

I was looking at them not sure what to do and decided not to get any. Then a saw a young woman buying some so I asked her how to eat them. She obviously uses them a lot because she immediately came up with a long list of dishes, none of which I knew.
I thought I would keep it simple, especially since I am in the camper and I had mine in a tortilla with avocado, cheese and some crushed corn tortilla (to add some crunchiness), and it was super nice.

Prehistoric Trackways National Monument

This is what I did this morning. The day was a little cool and it made for a really nice hike, especially since I didn't know where they were and I had to walk around for a bit. Anyway in the end I found them.

At first I didn't even know exactly where to drive. Once I saw this sign I thought I was in good shape.

The next sign gave me the boundary of the National Monument, always a good clue.

The five "fingers" in the one below give it away as a Dimetropus (the animal is the Dimetrodon the print is Dimetropus.

 This is not a huge footprint but not tiny either.

In this shot you have five footprints of Dimetrodon.

A set of much smaller footprints.

..and smaller yet.

I should say that these are NOT a dinosaur prints. These tracks are Permian in age, and in the Permian there were no dinosaurs. Just to get us out of the circular argument, "Are they not dinosaurs just because there are no dinosaurs in the Permian, or could they be used to show that in fact there WAS dinosaurs in the Permian since they are there and they are in Permian rocks" I want to add right away that dinosaurs do not have five fingers, wrong lineage.
I know the same circular argument can be made again "did dinosaurs not have 5 fingers or do those show that some of them did". In truth unless you want to get down to the absolute nity gritty geology takes a little bit of faith and I believe....mostly because I know part of the nity gritty.
In a way I found that chemistry was also like that. It took to get into third year university chemistry to actually really make sense of the first two years. the first two years felt to me more like accepting than understanding.

If you click on the photo below it will get larger and you can read about it.

The carbonates (limestones in this case) are full of fossils shells, crinoids etc but themudstone also has some plant remains. what I saw was mostly in small pieces but there was one very good example.
These are remains of Walchia, a conifer believed to be very similar to modern Norfolk Pine. I can't beleive I did not take a picture with something for scale. The fossils are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) long each.