Category: Happening In The Desert

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45 Foot Fall From Santa Fe Ski Lift

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0zioMFv2_pk

From the Santa Fe NewMexican Teen who fell from lift to gain national TV audience after video goes viral

An Albuquerque teenager who was virtually unscathed after falling about 45 feet from a chairlift at Ski Santa Fe earlier this month said he was terrified he would die if he fell, but he couldn’t hang on any longer.

Sheppard said the teen was transported via helicopter to University Hospital in Albuquerque as a precaution because patrollers didn’t know the extent of his internal injuries.

The youth suffered a lacerated liver and tears in both lungs, as well as a hairline skull fracture and a gash on his forehead that required 16 stitches. He spent three days in the intensive care unit, but was released without the need for any surgery and without a single broken bone.

The teen said he’s mostly healed now, but he is still waiting for doctors to clear him to play baseball because of concerns his liver might start to bleed again.

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Wrong Items Donated To Rio Rancho Goodwill

From the Rio Rancho Observer “Bullets, pipe donated to Goodwill“

Someone donated bullets and a duffle bag holding smoking paraphernalia to Goodwill last week.
According to a Rio Rancho Police report, an officer went to Goodwill at Southern and Unser about 10:45 a.m. Feb. 12 after employees sorting through anonymous donations found a glass pipe in a black Adidas bag and various calibers of ammunition in other property. There were 50 .22-caliber rounds, three 12-gauge shotgun rounds, a .410-shotgun round and what appeared to be one .22-caliber rifle round.
The items were entered into evidence at RRPD.
About 3 p.m. the same day, the officer went back to Goodwill after dispatch was told a man claiming to own the Adidas bag was at the store. The man told the officer he’d just gotten out of the hospital and a friend told him his property had been dropped off at the store.
The store manager said there was no way to verify who left the bag in the donation trailer, and the officer couldn’t charge the man claiming to own the bag because he couldn’t verify the owner of the pipe, according to the release.

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The Verge Visits The Trinity Site And The VLA

Looking Up

Jesse Hicks of The Verge presumably visited the Trinity Site and the Very Large Array in a single day. An a article titled “Prometheus in the desert: from atom bombs to radio astronomy, New Mexico’s scientific legacy” he compares the destruction of the trinity site with the more peaceful achievement of the Very Large Array.

The VLA captures the imagination in much the same way as Trinity, but without the latter’s dubious legacy. If Trinity represents an omega point of applied science — the almost inevitable outcome of work hypothesized by Fermi and Szilard, warned of by Einstein, and executed by Oppenheimer and his fellows — the Very Large Array epitomizes pure science, motivated only by inexhaustible curiosity. Yet that curiosity, that yearning to better know the world around us, produced a scientific apparatus unique in the world.

It’s not a good introduction for those not from New Mexico. It reminds me that I need to try to visit the Trinity site during one of it’s next open houses and the next time I drive by the VLA I need to actually stop and visit.

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Where Is The Village At Rio Rancho?

The Village at Rio Rancho goes here someday
The Village at Rio Rancho goes here someday

According to a Albuquerque Business First Article “Unser corridor bursting with retail, office activity” the Village at Rio Rancho was support to start “This Summer”. Since the article was written in May 2012 that would make it last summer. Currently all we have is a lot of cleared desert that will turn into atmospheric dust come this spring. The City of Rio Rancho only mentions this special tax deal from 2009.

Meanwhile down the road in Albuquerque “Construction starts on new Westside ABQ plaza“.

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Lost Dutchman Mine Searcher Remains Found In Superstitions Mountains

Superstitions

People die looking for the Lost Dutchman gold mine in the Superstitions Mountains, including Jesse Capen from Denver. He apparently fell to his death on his first day of searching. From the Denver Post “Denver man’s search for Lost Dutchman mine likely ended in fall“:

At the end of November 2012, a day pack containing Jesse’s GPS equipment, his mother’s camera and his identification was found at the bottom of a 180-foot cliff on the same mountain. Searchers spotted a boot in steeper terrain above the day pack.

“All of a sudden — out of the blue — they found him,” David Capen said.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department sent a helicopter to the side of the cliff, and deputies rapelled down to a skeleton, which was retrieved in a wire basket.

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CD Piracy In Rio Rancho

From KOB “Large scale CD piracy operation suspected in Rio Rancho“:

Rio Rancho Police arrested Wands on Dec. 19, in what they call a large scale CD piracy operation.

Police suspect Wands copied CDs and then sold the music at area flea markets.

According to a criminal complaint Wands sold undercover investigators 4,000 bootleg CDs for $1,300.

He got a warning from the RIAA he was being investigated and he didn’t know it was illegal.

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Miss Las Cruces Looks Good In her DWI Mugshot

20121217 052104 mug1217richardson GALLERY

From the Las Cruces Sun-News “Miss Las Cruces faces DWI charge after wreck causes power outage“.

The woman recently named Miss Las Cruces has been charged with aggravated DWI after allegedly hitting a light pole Sunday night, causing a power outage and disrupting traffic through this morning.
Just before 10 p.m., Sarah J. Richardson drove her Chrysler P.T. Cruiser into a light pole near the intersection of Avenida de Mesilla and Hickory Drive, according to a Las Cruces Police Department report. Investigators said the pole landed on a nearby traffic light. Falling wires and debris hit one car, became entangled beneath another car driving on Avenida de Mesilla then snagged a third car, the report said.
A spokeswoman for the local pageant, which is a preliminary for the Miss America competition, confirmed that Richardson, 22, is the 2013 title holder of Miss Las Cruces.

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Don't Hit A Cow In Rio Rancho

Untitled

There are too many issues with cows in northern Rio Rancho. It surprises me that the owners of the cows aren’t more concerned with where the cows are. If they don’t care about potential car accidents with someone being harmed or killed, I would expect they would be concerned about what is their lively hood. I’m afraid that someone will die before something is done about it.

This letter to the editor of the Rio Rancho observer “If you hit a cow, make sure you have NMLB phone number to verify owners” documents one persons attempt to hold someone accountable.

I want to share the following information with my fellow Rio Rancho residents. On Sept. 20, 2010, about 8 p.m., I slammed into a cow on Unser Boulevard near Progress Road.
In 2010, there were 10 accidents involving cows and, luckily, none of us was killed. I’ve spent the last 2 years working to hold someone accountable, including the City of Rio Rancho, to keep residents safe, but to no avail.
Also, I’ve also done lots of research to help us. I contacted the New Mexico Livestock Board (NMLB) after my incident and gave the NMLB administrator the cow’s ear tag number that the Rio Rancho police officer retrieved after my incident; the administrator told me it was a King Ranch cow and that the “family should be sued for negligence.”
I took the King Ranch brothers to court but the administrator testified that she never told me it was a King Ranch cow and that the cow’s ear tag is not the identifier. The case was dismissed on Sept. 20, 2012 with still no one held accountable.
If you or someone you know has an incident involving a cow, ask the officers to contact the NMLB at 841-6161 to identify the cow by its brand; the NMLB is the only entity that can identify cattle. Also, Rio Rancho is a “fence out” area meaning that cattle owners have the responsibility to keep their cattle fenced out of our highways.
We only have ourselves to help with the cow situations; let’s keep passing valuable information to each other.

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It's Scorpion Season

http://www.krqe.com/video_player/swf/EndPlayVideoPlayer_v1_4_FP10_2.swf?v=080912_0

I missed this KRQE news story last week “Scorpion season brings fright, stings” which indicates it’s the time of year to see scorpions.

Entomologist Alan Feuer says scorpions are born earlier in the year, and by now they have grown to 2 or 3 inches becoming much more aggressive, so people are seeing them now.

In the video they say that this year is not unusual for the number of scorpions.

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The Trestle At Kirtland Air Force Base

Boing Boing explains what The Trestle is at Kirtland Air Force Base. Further information is available at the wikipedia page for the the ATLAS-I (Air Force Weapons Lab Transmission-Line Aircraft Simulator), along with some photos showing aircraft on the Trestle being tested. The Trestle is easily viewable when landing or taking off from the Albuquerque Sunport.

The Trestle, Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Constructed over four years in the late 1950s at a then-astronomical cost of $58 million, the Trestle is still the largest all-wooden structure in the world, comprising over 6 million feet of timber. Part of the Air Force’s research into the after effects of a nuclear blast, a range of aircraft, including huge B-52 bombers and Air Force One were hauled up onto the Trestle, where they would be bombarded with electromagnetic pulse waves (EMP) fired from an emitter on either side.

EMP waves travel long distances in a very short amount of time and can seriously disrupt electronic systems, as we also know from powerful solar emissions. Understanding how EMP might affect the functioning of retaliatory nukes, bombers or command and control aircraft was therefore an essential part of post-apocalyptic preparations.

Every element of the Trestle, right down to its oversized nuts and bolts, had to be wooden so that none of its own components would interfere with the effects of the EMP wave on the aircraft being tested (though apparently there are some small metal o-ring components deep in the mix). Inspecting all the joints took a dedicated team a whole year; as soon as they had finished it was time to start again.

A unique monument to Cold War rigor and ingenuity, reminiscent of a huge fairground ride, perhaps the Cyclone, Coney Island’s wooden roller coaster, or a wooden labyrinth, the Trestle is now a condemned structure, too unstable to use, too expensive to dismantle. Today it provides a home to local wildlife, including a colony of great horned owls who can be heard screeching from within its depths. Our guide tells us that she likes to collect the skulls of their prey, which they leave scattered around the base of the structure.