Fri – Sat, March 20th – 21st
The night before, I was at Beaver Dunes Park in Beaver OK, on the east end of the Oklahoma Panhandle. [The Oklahoma Panhandle history: Why did Texas give up its land to Oklahoma? Texas gave up the land that became the Oklahoma Panhandle to comply with the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel.]
I drove across the panhandle, got gas in Boise City (in Oklahoma!) then crossed into New Mexico. The drive through NM was filled with a lot of unusual geology and a lot of history: the Santa Fe Trail, used by the first wagons heading west, and Sierra Grande, the largest volcano in NE New Mexico, 8,720ft tall.
I had a reservation for 2 nights at a KOA in Raton NM. When I arrived there I caught a beautiful picture of what is called a waxing crescent moon. My truck needed an oil change and the only place I could find on a Saturday was a Walmart, about 30 miles north, in Trinidad, Colorado. On Saturday, I started early and drove north. I didn’t realize that the time zone had changed, so I got to Walmart an hour early. They took me in anyway!
When I got back to NM I stopped at Capulin Volcano. It was a huge crater and I walked up the trail and most of the way around. It also gave me a full 360^ view of the surrounding landscape. The shortgrass prairie and the mountain forests meet in the high plains of NE New Mexico. This is the western limit of the North American Great Plains. The scenery in what is called the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field was a lot of volcanic rock, cinder cones, mesas from lava flows, etc. The rest of the area was active volcanos from as much as 9 million years ago! The NE corner of NM contains about 1000 square miles of volcanic activity over millions of years! Capulin Volcano erupted about 60,000 years ago when the the mammoths and giant bison roamed the plains. It erupted 10,000 years ago and blasted lava into the air where it cooled and fell as rocks on the crater. The Capulin Volcano is now a National Monument.
Next stop: Heading north into Colorado to the Great Sand Dunes.
Hover over any photo (below) to see the caption. Click on any photo below and you can scroll back and forth thru them. Use the arrows at the bottom of each photo.
