carrying on despite the snow

today i attempted the drive i made yesterday morning successfully. the sun was shining and i had my visor down and my sunglasses on. i arrived at El Morro National Monument before it opened and used the time to clean up my car a bit. i talked with the ranger, acquired my walking guide, perused the small museum, and walked out the door to begin the trail. the sky was gunmetal gray and snow was pouring from the sky in large wet flakes. sigh. i carried on anyway.

El Morro (which means the headland) is carved with inscriptions of passersby from a variety of backgrounds. they stopped here for a water hole that collected water from the headland and stored it in a 200,000 gallon pool with an amusing talent for echoes. there are petroglyphs, many spanish explorers, the camel corps (they were testing the feasibility of camel trains over mule trains and found them superior), and scouts for train lines. the very first english inscriptions were left by explorers who documented and sketched the inscriptions there in the 1800s so there is a clear and accurate record of the older inscriptions and a lot of research has been done to determine who the people actually were.

i figured it was better to go forward instead of backwards despite the falling snow. rachel had recommended a cafe for a meal, but i just stopped for a cup of coffee bc of the foreboding inclement weather. my next stop was El Malpais (mal-pie-eese) National Monument, spanish for the badlands and used to describe any lava features in new mexico. the ranger told me the lava tubes were so interesting and i asked her if they were really any different thatn the lava tubes in Hawaii. Her reply, 'they are so much older.' does that really make a difference? she was really nice and did give me good information. the ranger convinced me that i needed to see the ice cave so i went back to see it. it was snowing fiercely again, but i zipped up my jacket, put on my rain pants, and slid on my yaktraks and hiked to the lip of a cinder cone. i also visited the ice cave which is 31* year round and has twenty feet of ice in it. the sun came out and illuminated the green color of the ice caused by an algae. i returned to El Malpais and viewed some lava tubes and sink holes. i spent some time talking to a canadian couple on the trail despite the snow bc they were heading north and going where i had gone and i am heading south and going where they went.

i headed through grants on 66 to get to the other side of El Malpais and it was sunny and it was not snowing. as soon as i got back into El Malpais the sky was gray and snowy again. weird. i went to the ventana arch and to the sandstone bluffs for the view and unsurprisingly there was no view other than gray clouds.

i headed back into grants and visited the New Mexico mining museum - all about uranium mining. There used to be over a hundred mines in the area and five processing and refining plants. Now there are none. The basement of this building is a simulated uranium mine with the recordings of miners telling you how the mine worked. i watched the video of how the mine worked too and was unsurprised to see in the sixties the lack of safety gear. i wonder how many of these men were adversely affected by mining uranium? sadly, the uranium cafe where i could go eat yellow cake was closed. (yellow cake is the name of processed uranium ore - a nerdy joke that probably not many people got and who knows maybe why it is closed.)

so back in gallup for the evening and awaiting the flea market tomorrow. then i am off to albuquerque.