I made my third (what is becoming an annual) trip to the Ojito Wilderness in April of 2013. What I like about the Ojito is how close it is to Albuquerque and how short the actual hikes are to some amazing landscapes.
This time we took a hike up to the Bernalitto Mesa immedialty west of the hoodos. It was about a 500 foot climb to the top.
Somewhere in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1972 there was bunch of junked vehicles piled along a fence, according to
Update: There are a number of embedded images from Flickr in this post, however Flickr isn’t serving them up right. Please visit the set to see more.
If it wasn’t for a link to a “Bear Festival” in the Duke City’s Fix Morning Fix, I would have never known about the Wildlife West Nature Park in Edgewood, New Mexico.
I went on a hot Saturday afternoon. There wasn’t many people and there wasn’t much of a festival going on, although I did get a free hot dog. Wildlife West has a chuck wagon dinner and country music show in their amphitheater about 7pm and I suspect more of the actives occur around this time. I’m not sorry to have missed the country music.
Wildlife West is not the Albuquerque Zoo (nor is the Albuquerque Zoo the San Diego Zoo). Wildlife West is more of a native animal park which sets native animals of New Mexico in the native environment of New Mexico. It’s not huge but it is well laid out and the animal habitats are well designed and professional. All of the animals, some which are protected and illegal to own, come to the park as human imprints or were injured in some way that they most likely would not survive in the wild. Personally, I find this sort of zoo (or animal park) as much if not more interesting.
The park starts off with a marsh that’s protected with a 6 foot wall and some view niches. I’m not sure if this was an incomplete exhibit or the expectation was to view the animals from the niches, but all I saw were ducks.
The next exhibit was of Dusty the Road Runner. The Road Runner is the state bird of New Mexico and is protected. Dusty is an Imprint. I find Road Runners to be beautiful birds and welcome any chance to see them up close.
I came to the park for the behind the scenes tour of Koshari the bear, for which I failed to read the info panel. I don’t recall how the bear came to the park. It’s interesting that even the Albuquerque Zoo doesn’t have a native New Mexico bear. Other than Wildlife West, the other way to see a native bear is to camp in the Sandia Mountains and put food in your tent. The behind the scenes tour included a guided tour behind the exhibit where we got a slightly closer look a the bear through a chain link fence and the tour guide enticed the bear with peanut butter on a dog bone. Not as impressive as I expected but informative and interesting.
There were a number of other animals that I saw including Phantom the Puma, Farley the Gray fox and Sparky the Lynx. There were also a number of animals that I did not see including the wolves and elk. Most of the animals were smarter than the humans and were staying in the shade. Unfortunately I did not see a lot of animals I would have liked to have seen.
The bird exhibits were left for last and were probably the most interesting. Although the exhibits seem small, most of the birds could not fly. For example Ernie, the Great Horned Owl, right wing was damaged probably from being hit by a car. This is the first time I have seen a native Owl up close.
I would recommend that anyone check out the The Wildlife West Nature Park in Edgewood, New Mexico. The website claims that the park is a few minutes from east Albuquerque, but it’s about an hour from Rio Rancho. I suggest going when it’s not 100 degrees, for both the humans and the animals. It took me about 3 hours to walk through the park with only about half of the animals viewable and I would also suggest anyone going to time their visit with the chuck wagon supper and show at about 7pm. The park costs are Adults: $7.00, Seniors: $6.00, Students: $4.00 and Children under 5: FREE. All of my photos from my last trip are geotagged and viewable on Flickr.
I just got back from a week long trip to San Diego, California. While there I thought (for among many reasons) that it would be nice to live there and not have to worry about scorpions.
I was wrong.
Ryan Rubion made a comment on one of my San Diego pictures on Flickr in which I find his picture of a captured Scorpion. In San Diego.
Compare Ryan’s photo of a captured scorpion to my own recently captured scorpion (by my cat) in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.
There is a 1999 Ford Ranger Electric for sale by a dealer in the Albuquerque Craigslist for only $27900. I’m very tempted to purchase it (I won’t).
I’ve reproduced the craigslist ad here and swiped the pictures from Flickr.
Update: I continue to get email asking if this car is still for sale. I am not the seller, I reproduced the ad from craigslist because I found it interesting. Don’t email me asking if its for sale.
1999 Ford Ranger Electric – $27900
Reply to: sale-1057064108@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Date: 2009-03-02, 12:01PM MST
Only 400
in existence!Own
a piece of automotive history!Operating and maintenance
costs are low….no oil changes….just plug
it in to fill it up with a charge. The car even makes its own energy
when the accelerator is released and the electric motor generates a
charge to the battery. It is powered by a rear-mounted 90-hp electric
motor with a top speed of 70 mph.Background
storyFord was forced to manufacture
this vehicle between 1998 and
2001 so it could meet the California Air Resource Boards Zero Emissions
Vehicle regulations. It cost over $80,000 for Ford to make this
vehicle! If you have seen the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car?, you
will know the whole story of what happened to electric vehicles like
this Ford Ranger. Most of them were crushed upon lease return!There were only 1500 Ford Ranger EVs made between 1998-2001 and today
there are only about 400 left with only 100 that have the special
Nickel Metal Hydride Batteries. Compared to older lead-acid technology,
NiMH batteries are lighter, charge faster and increase the overall
range per charge. Lucky for you and 399 other individuals, not all of
these Ranger EV’s were crushed. These vehicles were warehoused after
lease return and finally released to Ford’s battery pack manufacturer
for testing.
Vehicle Systems
- Tires: Low-Rolling
Resistance- Air Bags: Driver and
passenger side- Equipped Air
Conditioning/Heater: Standard- Anti-Lock Braking System
(ABS): 4-Wheel- Steering: Electro-Hydraulic
Power- Brake Assist: Front
& Rear – Disc- Regenerative Braking:
Standard- Transmission: Automatic
- Audio System (AM/FM/CD):
AM/FM Cassette- Recharging Specifications:
Conductive Charging – 240v/30
amp- Suspension: Front – A Arms/
Rear – Leaf SpringVehicle
Specifications
- Wheel Base (in.): 112
- Overall Width (in.): 69.4
- Vehicle Size: Overall Length
(in.): 187.8- Payload (lbs.): 1,250 lbs.
- Max Number Occupants: 3
passengers- Overall Height (in.): 65.6
- Curb Weight (lbs.): 4,196
Performance
- Acceleration: 0 – 50 mph in
12.5 seconds- Recharging Time: 6-8 hours
- Range: avg. 60 miles
- Maximum Speed: 70 mph
- Miles: only 9k!
Moonlight over Spruce Hole, originally uploaded by gregjsmith.
I completed my third yurt trip and it was by far the best. The basic concept here is that we cross country ski to a Yurt and spend a few days away from the world. The Spruce Hole yurt is nice because it has bedding and is fairly large. The yurt itself is located in Colorado just across the boarder from Chama, NM. All we really need to carry is food, drink, clothes and personal hygiene items. There were four other people besides my self on this trip and we stayed for three nights.
This is usually the only cross country skiing I do, I’m mostly a down hill guy. Plus I’m not in any great shape and I therefore tend to be the slow one of the group. Caring a 30 to 40 pound pack doesn’t help. The first several hundred yards of the trail are all up hill. It is grueling work getting there but worth it once we finally arrive.
This particular trip was planned around the full moon. The highlight was our moonlight ski in the nearby Spruce Hole meadow. The moon was incredibly bright and blue. It was an incredible experience that I can’t begin to describe with my pathetic words and pictures. Speaking of which, taking pictures in moonlight requires a tripod which I didn’t have. Yet I managed to take a few decent pictures. You can find all the pictures I took on my Flickr set. They are all geotagged so you can view them on a map.
Last weekend I went on an overnight hike with two friends to the Pecos. Pecos is located east of Santa Fe, about 2 hours away from Albuquerque. Actually, the hike itself was to the Hamilton Mesa which is north of Pecos.
The original plan was to hike 7 miles in but when we were 2.5 miles in and found some good campsite, why keep hiking? During the day the weather was perfect and in the middle of the night it was piss-ass cold. A good sleeping bag helps with that.
This was an opportunity for me to get geotagging down with my SG-289 data logger and and to take some HDR photographs. The geotagging didn’t work out because the stupid SG-289 didn’t record more than a few dozen points. I swear I read 609 points on it at one time.
HDR photography was much more successfully. I took nearly every picture with auto bracketing on and about a quarter of the landscape photos made good HDR. The two problems with the pictures were moving objects such as wind blowing trees around and most of the photos were taken free hand without a tripod. Photomatix Pro did a pretty good job of aligning images but it can’t do much about the moving objects, at least in this case.
You can view all the pictures in my Flickr set: Sept 2008 Pecos Hike. Note that pictures of people have privacy set so you have to be a friend or family to view them.
Here’s an example of a non HDR and a HDR photo.
I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portland Oregon on short trips several times this year. There is very rarely a direct flight from the Sunport to anywhere except a state directly next to New Mexico. This time I went through Denver International Airport for the first time. I was pretty interested to fly through Denver this time because of the conspiracy theories associated with it.
Lets start with the murals. I didn’t get a chance to see them, I wasn’t sure if they were past the security area and if I had time get to where they are. I’ve read about them and there many pictures up on Flickr. When you see the giant picture of the nazi dude with the dead children, well that’s just disturbing. There is another mural showing different people of the world bringing down this nazi dude. I think the point of which is to show what happens if the people of the world don’t come together to eliminate the bad guys. Still, this is pretty odd. It doesn’t help the rest of the conspiracy theories.
anomalies-unlimited.com is the main source for the conspiracy theories. As I read through the sites, its easy to dismiss many of their claims. First one being that “Denver already had what everyone said was a perfectly fine airport – Stapleton.”According to Wikipedia, Stapleton was serious too small and poorly designed to be the 4th busiest airport in the US, which is what DIA is now. I believe Wikipedia’s explanation more then anomalies-unlimited.
I won’t go through all the things that anomalies-unlimited points out. Some of it just doesn’t make sense that it’s part of a conspiracy. However there are some odd things they do warrant future inspection. Such as the fact that DIA was 2 Billion (with a “B”) over budget. Where did that money go? anomalies-unlimited seems to suggest that it went to a vast underground military complex that exists under the airport and that the purpose of the airport was really just to build this complex. Seems to me that one would build such a complex under a less busy airport.
My limited experience at the airport indicates that the airport is pretty well designed and huge. I think the A gates went from 1 to 99. Although I generally dismiss the conspiracy theories, I did note something strange at the A gates. There are these mosaic tile images of people standing and walking through the terminals located on the floor. They are kinda weird in that they are top views and you can only make them out if you get up high (there is a higher level one can view them). In between these mosaics are a border and on these boarders are words like “North America”, “Europe” and “Antarctica”. Next to these words are random symbols that seem to have no purpose at all. These are all mosaics which are pretty easy to make out, with continent names in upper case. Near some of these content names are other words in lower case and the tile colors are really close to the back ground making it hard to figure out what they say. The symbols kinda look like random characters from the Zapf Dingbats font. Perhaps these are codes to the Aliens that come through DIA to tell them which continents they need to go through when they arrive.
anomalies-unlimited.com does have one final item that I agree is strange, the odd tablet with a masonic symbol on it. Above that tablet is what appears to be a keypad. What the heck is this thing and why are there no better pictures of this thing than the poor quality ones on their website?
Picture from Flickr of Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones 4 movie. It’s being filmed in Deming, New Mexico. From the picture page:
FIrst glimpse of Indy since 1989.
Photo shot on set by Stephen Spielberg. uploaded to flicr for use in a danish langauge blog post 🙂 More info about the shot here: indianajones.com/community/news/news20070621.html
Friday and Saturday marked the second annual X Prize cup in which the AP has a article about. I wasn’t able to make it to this years event (my pictures from last years are on Flickr).
A lot of other people did go and they put their pictures on Flickr. Looks like it was a much better event with real working aircraft. One thing I noted last year were most of the stuff on display were mockups, as opposed to actual working machines. Not to mention that they had more stuff in the air. I will try to go next year but will go for sure when it’s at the real space port.
Another interesting note, last year it was call the “preview event” and this year it’s called the “second annual”, meaning that last year was really the “first annual”. Whatever.
Doesn't Fit In 