Southeast Arizona 2011

Chiracahua National Monument in the southeast corner of Arizona is a remarkable mountain treat.  The Chiracahuas rise to over 7,000 feet as a mountain “island” above the desert.  The rock here has eroded in tall columns and balanced rocks.  The Chiracahua Apache lived here under the leadership of Cochise.  Hiking among the columns of rock and cliff views was amazing.  Don again hiked into rough terrain, but when it got really rough, he waited while I scrambled ahead for a ways.

We camped two nights at St. David at a monastery where Mary Jo and Harvey from the Las Cruces Habitat build volunteer the rest of the winter.  Ron and Jean from the build were also passing through, so we all had dinner together to catch up and reminisce about the great time we had in Las Cruces. 

We spent a day in Tombstone where we watched the gunfight at the OK Corral and saw the graves at Boot Hill.  The OK Corral is a reproduction, but the show there explained the events leading to the infamous shoot-out.  The Earp brothers were not universally considered the good guys; they may have fired the first shots that killed some of the area’s questionable cowboys.

We thoroughly enjoyed the Bird Cage Theatre museum.  This bar closed when the mines closed in 1889; it was boarded up for nearly 50 years, untouched.  When it opened as a museum in the 1930’s, everything was intact, even the poker table where a game went on for eight years straight in the 1880’s.  The Birdcage was the inspiration for the Lillian Russell song that debuted on this stage, “Bird in a Gilded Cage,” referring to the girls who served more than drinks to men in the box seats above the main floor of the theatre.  Wyatt Earp met his second wife there, where she offered “negotiable affection.” 

The original "Little Egypt"

We normally don’t do caves—too dark for Don to see anything.  However, many people talked us into seeing Kartchner Caverns, and it did not disappoint.  This is a rare “living cave” meaning water still seeps and all the amazing formations are still dripping and growing.  We had to go through several airtight passages to enter to keep the atmosphere inside consistent.  Don managed to get around with the help of the railings, and he did see most of what the guide pointed out.  Beautiful place.

Next stop:  Tucson

Silver City, New Mexico, January 2011

Silver City is a charming old mining town on the Continental Divide in southwestern New Mexico. We spent over a week there visiting my cousin Marie and her husband Gordon.  They wined and dined us and took us everywhere.  It was so wonderful to spend quality time with them.

Marie and Gord’s house.  Marie is a great cook, so she has a marvelous kitchen.  We hate to leave—it has been such a wonderful visit.

Rose Valley RV Ranch was a lovely place to stay.  Our camper is on the lower right.

The Santa Rita copper mine is a mile across & 1600 feet deep—one of the largest open pit mines in the world.

Marie and I in the Gila National Forest.

The Catwalk is a mile trail following a path of an 1890’s water pipeline for a mining town down the mountain.  The Catwalk crosses the creek on many bridges and clings to the canyon walls.  What a glorious hike!

The suspension bridge.

Don and Gord at the end of the trail.

Great old sycamore trees grace the picnic area at the trailhead.

The Gila Cliff Dwellings were built by Mogollan people in the late 1200’s.  They had to bring rock and mud for mortar up to these caves high on a cliff, as well as water and the food they grew in the valley below on a tributary of the Gila River.  Soot still stains the ceilings, and walled rooms still divide each cave.  The trail winds through the canyon and up the side of the cliff—another wonderful hike.

Between 1985 and 1903 several flash floods took out Silver City’s Main Street and carved out The Big Ditch, 55 feet deep for miles.

City of Rocks State Park is an array of volcanic rock left in clusters that look almost like buildings with winding paths among them.  Wandering and climbing the rocks was like being a child again.

Look at the color of that sky!

We have been doing a lot of rocky hikes, and Don valiantly makes it up and down, over stones and around boulders, through icy patches and dark places.  I guide him and usually manage to help him avoid the roughest parts.  The views and experiences have been worth it as Willy Nelson reminds us, “seeing things we may never see again.”

Mesilla Valley Habitat for Humanity, Week Two

Las Cruces (the crosses in Spanish) has been an interesting place to live for a couple weeks.  We have enjoyed seeing the desert, Southwestern style homes, and especially the Organ Mountains looming over the east side of the city. 

Mesilla Valley Habitat is building six houses right now, and one family of new home-owners-to-be worked with us all last week.  She explained how her family emigrated from Mexico to make a better life here since everything is so poor where they lived.  They tried a number of times to buy a house, but with no down payment and an only moderate income, they did not qualify for a mortgage.  She said she prayed and prayed, and God answered their prayers through Habitat for Humanity.  She even brought her own homemade red enchiladas one day for all of us for lunch.  What a treat!

This week Don and I installed windows, did some interior bracing, cleaned up a bit, and kind of helped install a door. The leaders trained as we went along and made us feel valued and productive.   As we always have, we signed the house asking for blessings for all who live there. 

 Ron and Jean Gratz were the team leaders for this build.

Everyone on this build really connected.  We feel like we have a whole group of new friends.  They came from all over the country from a wide variety of professions, and all worked together beautifully.  I was also impressed with the strong women on this build and how women were valued as builders just as the men are.  No wimpy, girly behavior is allowed.  The women all identified with Mary Jo’s T-shirt that said, “I fought like a girl and won.”   One grandmother was a bit unsure of her construction skills and her strength with the hammer.  By the last day of the build she helped install sheetrock and was declared the “supreme screwer” of the build to everyone’s delight.

Being God's servants with a hammer is evident from everyone.  It feels good to do physical work as service.  No job is too lowly for a servant of God.  It always feels like a blessing to us to be able to help put a family into a house of their own. 

Saturday we attended the Mesilla Valley Balloon Rally and the wonderful downtown market.

Habitat for Humanity, Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 2011

     We have arrived in Las Cruces to a very different place for us to build houses.  Most of our Habitat work has been on the Gulf Coast doing hurricane relief builds.  This is the desert—dry and cold, with cactus and gravel in the front yards instead of grass, stucco instead of the vinyl siding we like to do, and jagged mountains ringing the city.  Don raised an eyebrow or two when he backed the trailer into our camping spot and then went into the opening potluck dinner with his blind cane.  That’s how retinitis pigmentosa works.

We have 13 rigs on this build, many of them full-time RVers in big motorhomes who have worked many Habitat builds.  Nearly every place we have built, someone here has also worked there.  What fun to talk about places like Galliano and Slidell, Louisiana and Gautier, Mississippi and about wonderful people from former builds like Harry Fritts and Diane and George Gravlee.  Happy hour in the RV lot after work every day is a lovely way to relax after pounding nails all day.

With a week in and another to go, we have found the Mesilla Valley Habitat affiliate a great one to work with.  Don and I have worked together at a number of tasks involving most of the big power tools, which Don said he wouldn’t use, but he does.  Everyone is friendly and supportive.  Like with most Habitat builds, there is an emphasis on learning to build a house properly, not just keep busy.  Don has not dropped a 2 x 4 on me, so no black eyes like in Slidell on our first build.

 Here is lunch at the Riviera Las Cruces at the back of the worksite.

On Saturday we drove up to White Sands National Monument.  The dunes look like snow drifts, and people were even trying to slide down on snow disks (rather unsuccessfully), but it is really white gypsum sand from eroded deposits in the surrounding mountains.  With no river outlet, water simply evaporates in this desert leaving dry lakes of gypsum which then blows into dunes.

The soaptree yucca grows stretches upward to keep its leaves above the encroaching dunes.

An aquifer below the area provides enough moisture for a few cottonwoods, but they get buried by dunes as this one did.  Those are the top branches of a big tree.

Some plants have such extensive root systems that when the dune moves on, a hillock remains under the bush.   

We walked all the trails but took a shortcut on the longest one, circling back.  I told Don the truck was just over that dune over there.  It wasn’t.  He was beginning to worry, but we did get back.   This is a surreal, beautiful place.

 

Sunday we enjoyed a small, very friendly church with a dynamic service.  Lunch was at old town Mesilla, the first settlement here on El Camino Real before Las Cruces was founded. Billy the Kid was tried on the square, just one of many colorful events when Mesilla was a wild frontier town.  La Posta was a fabulous Mexican restaurant that we want to visit again before we leave.