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.