Roswell: Highway 285 to Berrendo Road

 This is my home territory now 

All that sky! All that land!

Roswell, New Mexico is situated in the northern Chihuahuan desert.

I make a couple of supply runs to the Walmart 1.7 miles away down a rural desert road. It's a new experience. 

I occasionally walk north on Main Street to the Tractor Supply Company (they stock good candy) and the Allsup's convenience store near highway 285.

Everyone I have known before moving here that has been here has only been to Allsup's. They're all truck drivers.

And on my recent 15 mile hike following Berrendo Creek, I covered the eastern part of this section of town. 

The main geological feature of this area is Berrendo Creek, which is dry for a long stretch.

The ground here is hardpan, alluvial deposits baked hard by the sun.

The vegetation is tough.... tumbleweeds and cactus. These gourds are common:

And, of course, the New Mexico state plant, of which I was surprised to find several species here ....yucca.

This is my home territory. 

I'll take this opportunity to talk about what I've learned about it to date. There will be several blogs in the series.

Bitter Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, 7 miles from Main Street is in this slice of town but I'll save it for it's own blog.

I've met two of my neighbors. Walking into town before a predicted wind storm, I saw her clearing tumbleweeds from her fence (I'll have to address tumbleweeds in a later blog). Later I met her husband on a tractor clearing the margin of the road. Friendly folks, like most of the people I've encountered here.

I've mentioned my enjoyment of diversity and this place is satisfyingly different from other places I have lived. I've experienced the desert winter and spring, wind storms, dust storms, a very little rain, and, now, a heat wave.

Anyone in the desert out there reading my blog? You're welcome, you're all welcome, to accompany me on this new journey.

The desert is blooming

 A special blog to dispell the idea that the desert is a dead place.

Berrendo Creek

 My first long hike in my new home followed Berrendo Creek through East Roswell, New Mexico. It begins South of my home. A mile south, it looks like a dry drainage ditch....a small, dry drainage ditch. Last year it flooded and took out a lot of property in Roswell 

You can tell where these desert streams sometimes are by the line of trees on a satellite image. 

These signs are no joke.

Here is Berrendo about a mile away as the meander runs.

Here, it has widened out into a broad flood plain. The same signs are on the road.

Less than a mile away.....

These 20-30 foot deep ravines, meanders, and oxbows were created by a powerful river, so where is it?

UFOs didn't put Roswell on the map.

Remember the Rule of Five. An average human can live five minutes without oxygen, five days without water, and five weeks without food  Communities are the same, five days without water, and the few little creeks in Roswell wouldn't bring nearly enough water to support a community. There were several settlers that tried.

Then, in 1899, Nathan Jaffa, a resident of Richardson Avenue drilled a well in his yard and hit the deep aquifer. Roswell had plenty of water from then on. The Pecos Valley Railroad came in 1892.

The Roswell basin actually has two aquifers  One is close to the surface but it's not very productive and has to be pumped. Then there's a deep layer of jointed limestone that's fed by the Pecos River and occasional rain runoff. This deep aquifer is capped by nonpermeable shale so it's under pressure and, when holes are punched through the shale, shoots water to the surface as artesian springs and wells. In other words, it pumps itself.

Normally, Berrendo Creek is fed by these artesian springs but all the farms and ranches in the area have these:

It's an artesian well. So much water is drawn from the deep aquifer for agricultural and industrial purposes (and to a lesser extent, household water) that it doesn't get to the creek 

On January 11, I set out to follow Berrendo Creek from North Roswell to the public fishing spot near 19th Avenue and Red Bridge Road.

I couldn't actually follow the creek without tromping through private properties, which I don't do without permission  I followed Pine Lodge Road through town, stopped at the Walmart for supplies and McDonalds for coffee, and continued east across the rural desert to Atkinson Avenue, where I turned South.

The desert along Pine Lodge Road 

Berrendo runs through a deep valley to the west of Atkinson. There's still no water.

A little further, Atkinson joins and becomes Berrendo Road. The bridge across the creek bed is interesting 

I don't see this conglomerate in the geological papers of the area. But it's outstanding. The cobbles are around tennis ball sized and seem to be solid, waterworn quartz.

The creek bed looks like it would form a nice waterfall here (about six feet) when there is water.

I stopped here for lunch.

A little further down Berrendo Road was an interesting ranch with a construction called "The Henge" that is mentioned as a significant example of modern architecture on the Internet 

The Henge was created by Roswell resident Herb Goldman and includes a gallery with mural painted by Willard Midgette. It is recognized on the State and National Register of Historic Places.

My hike from Berrendo to Red Bridge Road was through ranch lands. The sky is open, the land is flat, and it's a great place to spot raptors. It's not that great for taking photos of them with a phone.

Heh. You have to expand the photo to see it.

I joined Red Bridge Road at Bitter Lakes Farm which advertised Pistachios. This area has several tree nut farms including the pecan farm next to my home 

The house is an Adobe style ranch home.

New Mexico is famous for its nut crops.....piñon, pecan, pistachios, and peanuts.....and the piñon pine is the state tree. 

The hot, arid climate and long growing season that allows the nuts to mature are good for nut trees. Despite being in the desert, the Pecos River and it's tributaries have laid down some nicely fertile souls in some areas around Roswell.

Somewhere out among the ranches, an artesian spring feeds Berrendo Creek.

Just in time to fill the public fishing spot, which was well attended on the day of my hike. I was able to talk to some of the fishers who reported good catches. Catfish and bass are resident there and the creek is stocked with trout.

The water isn't green from pollution. It's calcium. I saw the same green water back East in the karst regions of Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. This water certainly comes from that deep, limestone aquifer.

The ducks seem to like it, too 

But I was hiking and, with miles to go yet, I started out toward town.

 

 
The "Red Bridge" of Red Bridge Road

The first two miles into town is along ranchlands. Soon after entering town proper, there was an old cemetery that has plans to renovate (it currently looks a lot like pictures I've seen of boot hills from the 1800s.)

About a mile further brought me to Goddard High School. As memorial to the inventor of the liquid fuel rocket which developed to carry people to the moon, there are rockets out front (I will have to revisit this place some time in future explorations of Roswell )

Finally, reaching Main Street about five miles from home, I was ready to find supper. By the time I reached the home stretch, the 1.7 mile rural desert road to home, it was very dark and surprisingly cold (out came my headband flashlight, flannel shirt, and leather jacket.)

Some people talk bad about Roswell. I suppose it isn't a major party place but for people like me who values adventure and diversity, it offers plenty. 

And so does your home. Go find the hidden treasures around you.

Where does your city water come from and how is it treated? Is your home range famous for any particular crops? If so, why are they grown there and not somewhere else?

 

Another moving experience!

This is now our front yard because we have relocated to the Chihuahuan desert....a town called Roswell, New Mexico. Yep, aliens and yucca. It's an adventurous move and it'll take a few blogs to catch up to my biology studies. 

This is a small town similar in size to Selma, Alabama where I once lived. I generally hate "flat" but this area reminds me so much of South Georgia, where my relatives used to live that it hits a comfortable nostalgic note. The people here are generally friendly and quite spoken compared to what I'm used to. In fact, I have a little trouble hearing them.

The elevation is 3,570 feet so it's certainly on the slope of the Great Plains but the topography is just flat 

This mountain....

 

Sierra Blanca, is the only bump on the horizon but it's a stratovolcano over a hundred miles to the west. We passed through two road cuts through cinder cones on the way south. I'll have much more to say about the geology here and the Rio Grande rift to the west.

There are the usual businesses plus farm supply stores (another memory from the southern United States). There's a library and several museums (not all about aliens and UFOs.

Although people often think of Area 51 and the UFO conspiracy theories associated with it when they think of Roswell but Area 51 is far to the west in Nevada. I guess I'll be talking about UFOs later. I'm reading a friend's book (the friend being Dr. Gregory Reece.....the book being UFO Religion) to catch up on it. It's one of the least interesting things about Roswell to me but I'm sorta an outlier about that. Frankly I like the Roswell Sonic's root beer blended floats (best I've ever had!) better 

So, it'll be Roswell for awhile (eh, but I'm keeping "Bear Creek Commentaries" for the blog title.....

LibreOffice for Android phones

 I have been lamenting that there is not a good app for Android phones to use LibreOffice. LibreOffice has been my productivity suite of choice because 1) it is free, and 2) it works like the old Microsoft Office suites, which means intuitive (plus the macro language is easy to use Basic.)

Past LibreOffice apps for Android have been clunky and buggy and would not run my Homebrew macros, especially DANSYS and DANSYSX. Well, I can now recommend the AndrOffice app which seems to work just fine on my small screen.

Give it a try.

Fungi

Ever play 20 Questions? The classic first question is "Is if plant, animal, or mineral?"

 In my youth, biology courses were mostly descriptive. Everything was either plant, animal, or mineral but people started noticing that things were more complicated than that. For instance, where they thought that bacteria were single cell plants (they had cell walls like plants) they don't have a nucleus. The genetic material, DNA, was just floating around in the cell.

These guys

are sorta weird to. They look like plants but their cell walls are composed of chitin, the material that forms the shells of insects and crustaceans. So fungi don't quite fit the old scheme of things.

So, now, we have several "kingdoms" of living things. Plants and animals are still there but we also have the protista, single cell eukaryotic (the have cell nuclei) beings. That includes protozoa. And there are the monera that are prokaryotic (they don't have cell nuclei) and include the bacteria. The fungi have their own kingdom because of that cell walls thing.

But there are other schemes floating around. One splits the monera into the eubacteria, the true bacteria, and some weird organisms that like extreme conditions of temperature, chemical environments, pressure, etc., the archaebacteria.

Then there are slime molds that sometimes act like plants and at other times act like animals. Some protozoa lack mitochondria which is another kind of weird.

Things are a bit up in the air right now. Scientist would like to have a nice, simple classification scheme, but it looks like that is not to be 

Hiatus

 "Hiatus". It comes from a Latin word ("hiatus") meaning opening and the root of that is "hīo" meaning "to stand open" or to "yawn". That's rather appropriate.

Recent events and especially this brutal (for me. Other folks around me seem to love it.) summer have worn me out and I need to rest from my adventures awhile so I will be taking a hiatus from my active adventuring. 

There are changes coming.....perhaps exciting changes.

But I'm not disappearing. I have a medical coming up and I like those (even the blood letting) as learning experiences. And I will be doing some more sedate commentating.

I have some things to say about life.....what it is and what it is not. My ramblings may be a little more......rambly, for awhile.

So, if you're new to the blog, you might want to look around and if you've been following it, I'm still here.

In the meantime......stay well 

Wolf

Cherry Creek: The Pinery to Castlewood Canyon entrance

 

This is the first mile marker that I saw on this hike. These posts have been my constant companions throughout the hikes from the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. At this point I have hiked 33.5 miles along Cherry Creek and I am nearing the end of the journey.

I began this segment where I left off the last. I went as far as I could on trains and buses and had to take a Lyft taxi from downtown Parker to the Pinery Park and Ride. From there, I hiked down to the Cherry Creek Trail .

I was in for some big changes on this long section of the trail. On earlier hikes, I was walking between major bus stops. Pinery Park and Ride was the last RTD public transportation stop for me. 

The creek was mostly a meandering stream with some stretches with high banks and some areas where it became braided with multiple branches spreading out and coming back together. That usually happens when the gradient is shallow and there is little to keep banks from eroding. 

There was little of braided sections from here on up. I could feel the slope increasing as the terrain became hillier.

To this point, the valley walls have been like a wide bowl. Starting at I25, there's been a gentle slope down to the creek and the same on the other side of Cherry Creek. Here, the edges of the valley are high bluffs. Steeper gradients give the runoff more power to carve the landscape.

I'm moving onto Palmer Divide, the rise in the land that separates the South Platte River and Arkansas River water sheds.

Most of the bedrock here is the same unconsolidated stuff that fills the Denver Basin, but Palmer Divide is special. It's capped by a hard layer of rock that prevents erosion in areas. The result is mesalands.

36.7 million years ago (by radiometric dating) a mountain near present day Buena Vista, Colorado blew it's top in an eruption that absolutely dwarfs anything in human history. It produced pyroclastic flows that spread as far as 65 miles to the east where present day Castle Rock is situated. It covered that distance in less than two hours. The hot cloud of volcanic ash settled and welded together to form the Wall Mountain tuff. The erosion resistant cap that covers Palmer Divide is composed of the tuff and Castle Rock conglomerate that contains big chunks of this tuff mixed with other odds and ends, one being a blue quartzite (boulders up to six feet in diameter) which has a source 46 miles away near present day Boulder near Eldorado Canyon.

The Castle Rock conglomerate was deposited somewhere between 33.9 and 36.7 million years ago in a massive flood (or floods) or rivers that flowed from the northwest. It's been calculated that, for a flood to have moved such boulders so far, the stream velocities had to have been more than 27 miles per hour. No boulders this size moved by any modern Colorado River has been found more than three miles away from the mountains. Even the Big Thomson flood could not compare.

Big events in the past created this arm of hills jutting out from the Rockies into the plains.

Hidden Mesa is part of this hilly landscape rising 600 feet from the valley floor. If I were not trying to reach the canyon on this hike, I could have taken a trail to the top where a couple of hikers assured me there were great views of the surrounding land. The park also boasts of an experimental orchard and vegetable farm.

Instead, I walked into Franktown and ate at Adriana's Mexican restaurant, a friendly place with good food. I tried valiantly to not stuff myself .....and failed.

Franktown was the last town before the canyon and from there the rim of the valley closed in. This was ranch country and most of the area by the trail was posted.

There was plenty of life, wild and otherwise, along the trail. The entire Cherry Creek Trail has been popular with bicyclists, joggers, hikers, strollers and dogs. None of it has been crowded but no part of it has been empty of people. I've seen plenty of bird life (including hawks and eagles), prairie dogs, Beaver dams. The only megafauna other than humans (technically "megafauna" is any animal over 100 pounds) I've seen are deer but I'm pretty sure I've seen signs of coyotes (tracks, droppings).

I think the herd of deer in the picture above is the third I've seen on the trail.

One last switchback brought me up to the Eastern entrance to Castlewood Canyon State Park.

I think I've mentioned that I've never seen a photograph that does the canyon justice. In real life, the view from the entrance (first photo above) is breathtaking. If you enlarge the top photo, you can see the cap of Castle Rock conglomerate layer on top. 

The road in the picture runs through most of the canyon to the west entrance.

If you look really hard at the bottom photo, you can see the switchbacks of the Cherry Creek Trail. The mesas and plains extend our into the distance.

Hopefully, I will be able to return here to finish the Cherry Creek Trail.

Cherry Creek: Hess Road to The Pinery

 

I've mentioned this keystone species before. Beaver dams are common along Cherry Creek. I haven't seen one on the hike but I've seen plenty of their architecture. I think this is the first one I've seen with an entrance above the water level.

Around deeper waters of lakes and large rivers, beavers might not live in dams. They often build burrows. And, yes, they do eat and digest wood (usually bark). It takes about 20 minutes for a beaver to cut down a 15 centimeter (half foot) wide tree.

Far to the South of Denver, there are still murals. I'm not sure who's responsible for this one but it's nice. It's also the last one on the Cherry Creek Trail.

This is common weather on the plains. What's not common is the funnel cloud we had in Lone Tree (West of I25) the other day. Last year they had their first since they started recording weather for the region.

The plains (East of I25) produce strong updrafts that build high cumulonimbus (storm) clouds that spawn tornados. We had an early start of storm season this year with some active systems scurrying East 

A weir dam impounds a strip lake on Cherry Creek near the Pinery. Here, I'm hiking out of the long urban corridor of Cherry Creek into ranch lands. That just goes on and on interrupted by a canyon. Two more hikes will bring me to the end of the Trail.

Every half mile is a reminder of how far you are from the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Strangely, the other side doesn't tell how far it is to the end of Cherry Creek Trail in Cottonwood Canyon.

What else should one see on the prairie but prairie dogs. This town is huge and the inhabitants do not seem to be that bothered by the frequent hikers and bikers and dogs .

I've commented on these denizens of the Great Plains elsewhere in these blogs. They're one of the first examples of wildlife I encountered since they have taken up in the medians and on the roadsides in Broomfield where I first lived in Colorado.

This short section of Cherry Creek landed me in an affluent neighborhood where there is a stand of pines and I guess that's why they call it "The Pinery". I was hoping for more business but there is a bank and a country club.

Oh, and there's a bus stop but don't let that fool you into thinking that there's actually public transportation for hikers. The bus leaves The Pinery for Denver early in the morning and it returns in the afternoon as it's last stop, two runs only. It's purely a commuter bus. 

The last stop for the regular routes is in downtown Parker, about five miles to the north. If you want to travel South of Parker Park 'n Ride, you'll need to find another way. Lyft and Uber aren't too expensive.

And a parting view across the prairie across the plains from The Pinery Park 'n Ride

The next long stretch of the Cherry Creek Trail through ranch lands and mesas will bring me to a surprising canyon far from the mountains.