Architecture
J Volcano
In 1947, students from St. Joseph’s College ignited a pile of tires in the J Volcano, causing panic in Albuquerque as some people thought it was going to erupt. Later attempts at the same prank failed to cause even a stir. Nowadays, the pranksters would be charged with multiple felonies, smacked with harsh penalties and prison time.
Little House on the lava with a volcano in the background.
A third volcano
Outside looking in
The age of Aquarius
Beckons Pisces call
Three Rivers School 1904 on NM Highway 54 between Carrizozo and Tularosa. I don’t know anything about this building other than it sits behind the Three Rivers Trading Post, it’s old, it’s red, and where it is.
The above satellite map shows the location of Three Rivers School. The school and the trading post are 24 miles south of Carrizozo and 18 miles north of Tularosa. The border of the White Sands Missle Range is about a mile west of NM Highway 54 at Three Rivers. The south end of the Valley of Fires lava flow is the black area west of the Three Rivers. East of Three Rivers is Sierra Blanca Peak which is 11,981 ft (3,652 m) high. The Trinity Test Site where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945 is north and west of Three Rivers.
Here’s a close-up of the stone house in the landscape on Friday’s post.
Night sky at 2:00 am. The Pleiades is in the lower center and Mars is below the Pleiades. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Jupiter and four of its moons. The sky was clear last night, but I could not get Jupiter’s stripes, and the photos of Saturn were blobs. There must have been an atmospheric disturbance obscuring clear shots of the planets.
Paint hard at work at dawn
Get your minds out of the gutter. I’m talking about the clouds and the gate I installed today.
The painter was up at dawn working at a furious pace on the well-hung morning clouds and kept it up until after I got to work.
I installed the gate today that I ordered back in August that finally came in last week. The middle photo shows the sprung latch that I had custom-made by an artesian in Canada because I could not find any of the sprung latches in the US of A. They use to be common on garden gates, but there were none to be found. They were probably outlawed for some stupid reason, so we might have a fugitive latch. The gate is well hung if I might say so.
The painter was in a lavender mood tonight as gnarly clouds rolled in at sunset and were well hung hanging over gnarly trees.
De Vargas Mall. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Saturn is slowly making a circle around Jupiter. December 23, 2020.
My favorite photographer for today is Julie at Frog Pond Farm, https://frogpondfarm.co.nz/, in Waimauku, West Auckland, Newzealand. I have followed Julie for many years. She is a lovely person, a successful farmer, and a wonderful photographer. Frog Pond Farm is about as close to paradise as one can get.
For day 2 of the travel photo challenge, I present you with a lot of photos of Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado near the New Mexican border. We went to a Native Plant Society convention in August 2008 in Farmington, New Mexico near the four corners where New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah meet. The session we had signed up for was canceled at the last minute, so we drove up to Mesa Verde and spent a wet afternoon exploring the cliff dwellings. If you are afraid of heights, cliffs, steep climbs, and sheer drops, then Mesa Verde is not a place you want to visit.
The introduction on the Nationa Park Service website reads: “Mesa Verde National Park was established in 1906 to preserve and interpret the archeological heritage of the Ancestral Pueblo people who made it their home for over 700 years, from 600 to 1300 CE. Today, the park protects nearly 5,000 known archeological sites, including 600 cliff dwellings. These sites are some of the most notable and best preserved in the United States.” See https://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
We had one of those rare times for the Albuquerque area where it started raining Saturday night, stayed cloudy and rained all day and into the night on Sunday. The clouds were starting to break up when I got to the parking garage a little before 7:00 am this morning.
Off Center & Not Even 