2008 November

We crossed the Continental Divide Trail in Silver City, and today we find it again at what must surely be one of its most remote road crossings, New Mexico highway 12. We stop long enough to recall our concerns at the time, dry springs, injured feet, and the lure of Pie Town in the north. Then we get to making some new memories. I drop Ann off on her bike and drive ahead. The road traverses the plains of San Augustin, the same high plateau that is home to the Very Large Array radio telescope. Views are expansive and roads are straight. I ride back until I meet Ann, then join her. When we reach the camper she drives ahead while I ride to Datil. This point is another place of memories - the coldest night of my US Perimeter bike tour was spent here, shivering and surrounded by howling coyotes. These old recollections help make a vast world feel like home.

Toward the end of our 2004 Continental Divide hike, we met a bike tourist named Glenn. We had exchanged a couple of emails with him since and were able to arrange a meeting for coffee and breakfast at the Yankee Street coffeehouse in Glenn’s current home of Silver City. It really is good to reconnect with people we meet out in the wilds, I should make an effort to do it more often. Glenn introduces us to some cycling friends. He has a friend trying to convince him to make a trip to India, but he’s not sure he wants to “deal with a slum filled with 20 million suffering people”. The idea makes me shiver too! Glenn is a little crowd shy, like me.

We make our way north through some gorgeous country, with plains and mesas stretching interrupted by rough peaks and canyons. At the Aldo Leopold vista we make note of some large rocky spires above Big Dry Creek that may make a good hiking destination in the future. Today we visit the area’s main attraction, the Catwalk National Recreation Trail. In the tight volcanic canyon of Whitewater Creek miners built a gravity-fed pipeline in the 1890’s to power an ore mill. Now a catwalk follows the route of the pipeline up the canyon. From this vantage point we examine the canyon cliff walls, which seem like they would attract climbers, but we see no sign of climbing activity here.

The drive over Emory Pass is unexpectedly twisty, slow, and beautiful. A cold rain pours down, and when we make a pitstop on the far side of the pass we find a shivering German bike tourist in the restroom! Uli is most thankful for a hot cup of coffee before he heads to his next host arranged through warmshowers.org.

Further down the hill, we see a wild boar by the road. It disappears quickly, but there’s no question that it was a very large, bristly pig.

We arrive at City of Rocks State Park in the early afternoon, and I’m immediately enamored with the boulders, plains, and windmills here. The rocks are reminiscent of the boulders I cut my teeth on at Wagon Wheel. They stick up out of the plains in mushroom and tombstone shapes. For climbing, there’s plenty of slab, vertical, and overhanging rock with sharp edges and varying degrees of choss. It would definitely be entertaining to come back with a crash pad someday. For now, we hike a nice loop around area.

This funky town that named itself after a 1950’s game show embodies much of what I love about New Mexico. There are soft colors, prominent mountains, desert birds, and hot springs to enjoy in a cultural setting that defies explanation. This old, struggling tourist town in the middle of a desert filled with ranches, mines, a missile range, and a coming spaceport offers an experience that feels genuine, colorful, and a little run down. We stay in the state park by the Elephant Butte reservoir north of town and ride our bikes in for a little hot springs soak in the private baths at the Charles Motel & Spa.

We drive out Buckman road after dark just to spend a night outdoors. With no moon it’s wonderfully dark, and a couple of spectacular meteors flare through the blanket of stars. Groping in the dark with my headlamp, trying not to collide with any cacti, I find this cozy little nook between a cholla and a juniper. I love finding spots like this to bed down under the sky.

Ann shows me a ride she used to do way back when, with a bonus stop at the charming San Marcos Café. Again the sky is blazingly clear, and wind has a chilly edge.

I’ve been enjoying the biking we’ve been doing while Ann’s ankle isn’t yet strong enough for hiking. We didn’t take pictures today, but I thought it would be interesting to chart the effect of her injury at the end of week 37 of this year on my outdoor activities:

Climbing came to an abrupt halt, but I managed to keep some hiking up, and biking is on the rise. Suffering is not on the chart … must not be of significance.

Our route:

Of the three mountain ranges that converge near Santa Fe, I’ve only begun to explore two. To remedy that I get a nice early start on a clear day at the north end of the Sandia Range. A cold wind keeps me moving upward to views of ever more majestic cliff bands. The views are stunning in all directions - unfortunately the pictures just don’t do them justice. A hundred jaggy cliffs rise to the south, Cabezon Peak juts up in the West, the snow-capped Sangre de Cristos loom over the Cerrillos Hills to the northeast, and southwest the great plains stretch away to infinity. On the way down I discover the trail is full of ripe piñon, which keeps me snacking for most of the descent.

Map:

Interest in Geo Mashup is on the rise, and I will keep working on improvements as long I can afford to! This time around supporters include Bruce, creator of GeoTag Icons, agro.biodiver.se, www.sunshinebeachresorts.com.au, and others. Thanks!

I recommend that you look over the Beta Documentation before you download, upgrade, (and donate?:)).

Change Log:

• Added category, color, single, and multiple post icon customization.
• Added tabs to the options page using jQuery from WP core.
• Added “click to load” option.
• Added Google Earth map type.
• Added Jodi’s option to apply the current theme stylesheet to the map.
• Added “map_content” parameter to distinguish global, single, and contextual maps.
• Added experimental static image map.
• Corrected XHTML validation issues.
• Added retries to clickMarker for IE.
• Lots of code refactoring.
• Added code to strip geo mashup tags from excerpts to avoid infinite regressions.
• Factored options management out of geo-mashup.php to geo-mashup-options.php.
• Added option validation.
• Avoided PHP5 features to follow WP’s support of PHP4.
• Added contextual map default options.
• Added template url path to map properties.

My election day project as an early absentee voter is to ride my bike to every polling station in Santa Fe. It’s not quite what I expect. The great irony of the day is that the early voting dropoff seems to have been the only polling station to experience significant lines in Santa Fe. All 23 polls I visit are almost eerily quiet. I’ve loaded the photos into the map:

Or you can just look at the slides:

Later, well after dark, I hear McCain’s concession speech on the radio, and the significance of this election starts to become real to me. I won’t soon forget it.

A minor release with attempts to fix Issue 121, the “Cannot use string offset as an array” error. You should only need to download this version and upgrade if you’re getting this error with 1.1.1.

Also removed the old custom marker example from custom-sample.js because it’s no longer relevant for category markers, and marker customization for them is not complete yet.