Alien sculpture, White's City, New Mexico
We hooked up the trailer to leave this morning and found a problem. When I went to check the lights, the left turn signal was not working. On investigation, I found that the wire from the truck to the trailer had been partially cut. It must have gotten pinched in the hitch sometime when we drove in to the park at Oliver Lee. I spliced together the three wires which were cut, and tried the lights again. They still did not work. I tried re-joining them, tried testing with the voltmeter with no luck, and finally listened to Enid’s advice that, “maybe a fuse is blown.” I found that was correct when I checked the truck fuses, and fortunately we had a spare. So after a delay of about an hour we managed to get away.
We drove north through Alamogordo. The GPS insisted that we should turn to go a different route than we were heading, but we followed our instincts (and the road signs) instead. We think it was probably taking us on a route that bypassed the city, but it would have meant backtracking some to get to it, so our route was probably just as fast.
Almost immediately after turning onto highway 82 just north of Alamogordo, we started to climb. The road warns truckers not to use it, and it is pretty steep, climbing from the roughly 4000 foot level at Alamogordo, to over 8600 feet at Cloudcroft in a distance of 16 miles. Cloudcroft is a ski resort area, but there was absolutely no snow on the ground, though we did see piles of sand and salt and graders – and lots of signs warning of icy roads. The terrain here is very different than the desert, with large stands of ponderosa pine and a small stream that flowed along the road for a long way.
Then we coasted downhill for the next 100 kilometers or more into the town of Artesia which is an oil producing area, and smells strongly of hydrogen sulphide. They have many large bronze sculptures in the town, one of an oil derrick and crew. After that it was into Carlsbad, where once again our GPS took us on a strange route through the town, and on to White’s City.
“City” is hardly the correct term, as it consists of a restaurant, a motel, a small general store, and an RV park, and not much more. However, it is just outside the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and so serves to provide accommodation for that. The clerk didn’t seem too excited about getting us registered, but he did do so. You can tell you’re not too far from Roswell, as there were “alien” statues at buildings on both sides of the highway!