At 11,253 feet, the Valles Caldera is literally up there. Looking to do a little astrophotography, the moon won the night and that made the Milky Way only faintly visible. It was beautiful. That’s the real sound, and those aren’t Cocker Spaniels hanging out in the New Mexico wilderness.
Traveling from Albuquerque to Valles Caldera and the Dark Sky areas inside it, we passed by a gorgeous little waterfall on the Jemez River as the road wound through the Jemez Reservation. We stopped and took a quick look around, and I saw a beautiful place that was inspirational all on its own. It’s actually a a grouping of fifteen hot springs which have formed a unique calcium carbonate and travertine formation creating a bridge over the Jemez River and the waterfall below it where the river continues.
The dam was formed by deposits from thermal spring water that accumulated over the course of 7,000 years or more. The river flows through a dome-like bridge created by the deposition of these minerals across the river. The waterfall is over 300 feet long, 50 feet high, and 50 feet wide at the base.
The rocket junkyard, Alamogordo. Being that it was a no trespassing zone, that I was not from there, and it was in a decayed part of town (nothing terrible, just abandoned sites all around me) I didn’t go around the perimeter as much as I would have liked.
I’m guessing these are surplus parts from the White Sands range. I also think that this is a storage facility for NM Space History Museum.
Anyway, there were all sort of interesting tidbits in there. A rail from a rocket sled, a Matador tactical nuclear cruise missile, a few V-1 derivatives, etc. It was interesting to look at this stuff just sitting around in the elements.
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