Aztec Motel
In Albuquerque, we frequently tear down our old Route 66 motels, but keep their signs:
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
CLEAN ARGE R OO MS
The Desert Sun Motel is frozen at $19.95 a night (and up): CLEAN ARGE R OO MS $19/95& UP FREE COF EE CABLE TV HBO ESP VACANCY It looks like a project stalled in mid-renovation, though it’s hard to see how this could have ended well if the owners had continued to spend money. It’s …
Water in the Desert, San Juan River edition II
When last we met, I showed you the San Juan River looking like the only water for miles (and not much water at that) as it flows across the Ute Mountain Ute Nation near Four Corners. Today, after miles of driving around the high country of the Four Corners region (vacation road trip) I have …
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Water in the desert, San Juan River edition
My search for water in the desert took Lissa and I this afternoon up US 160 from Teec Nos Pos in Arizona’s far northeastern corner, past the Four Corners Monument and into Colorado, where the highway crosses the San Juan River. Teec Nos Pos has a weather station that averages 8.09 inches (20.55 cm) of …
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Big Foot and the Two Grey Hills Rug
tl;dr Lissa and I met a man today who saw Big Foot in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo Nation west of Newcomb, New Mexico. He could neither hear nor speak, but we have no reason to doubt his story. Lissa misplaced her purse, which was easily found, and we bought a …
“Mummy Lake” – we always want it to be about water
Lissa and I stopped this morning at Mesa Verde’s “Mummy Lake”, more recently renamed “Far View Reservoir,” on account of apparently there was never any mummy. Now we learn, thanks to science, that there was probably never a reservoir or lake, either: The structure at Mesa Verde National Park known historically as Mummy Lake and …
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Petroglyph Point
There’s an easy grace in spending a warm spring Friday afternoon with my partner of more than 30 years, looking at things we’ve looked at a million times before.
Vollman on the economics of Imperial Valley farming
Driving up through the Imperial Valley in March, I chanced upon this example of the fading hopes of the town of Brawley. In his maddeningly intriguing book Imperial, William Vollman briefly slips out of the obtuse into this rare moment of clarity: When I began to study the history of the period, my mind remained …
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Ghost ship in the blue haze
I was a little kid when I first saw Shiprock, the great volcanic neck on the northeastern edge of Navajo country, and I’ve been staring at it from all conceivable angles, in fascination, ever since. Most days you can see it through the distant haze from Mesa Verde, the plateau to the north, but …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: El Niño and the carnival barker
I’ve tried lots of different things to try to communicate the inherent uncertainties (at all time scales) in the forecast business. Here’s another stab at the problem: I feel a little like a cheap carnival barker foretelling you this, but FYI, it looks like El Niño is coming. New Mexico water managers, grappling with their …
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