Occupation of Independence

So maybe Robert Falcon Scott and Richard E. Byrd (author of Alone ) wouldn't be too impressed with the "cold" that we've been having here in the highlands of southern New Mexico -- after all, it's only a Dry Cold. But then again, so was theirs.  Last night I got overconfident and slept without wearing my winter parka. Big mistake. When I jumped out of bed this morning I wondered first if the water had frozen inside the RV. In my rig, freezing the plumbing is not destructive since the plumbing runs off of the water pump and inside reservoir, which makes for plenty of air spaces in the plumbing. It hadn't frozen, but the water pump hesitated like the starter motor in a car, after a cold winter night. Since I was getting suspicious of a "hard freeze" inside the RV, I had implemented standard winter survival techniques, such as filling a pan of water the night before. In the morning, if you do discover a freeze, you can still get breakfast going.

The local chamber of commerce likes to brag up the highlands of southern New Mexico as having "four gentle seasons." Who are they kidding? Our climate is a continental one, at 6000 feet above sea level; it has two semi-gentle and real seasons interleaved with two mathematical concepts known as spring and fall. If you're really serious about a four season climate, full-time RVing is the best thing to do. But I'm a townie now. Neighborhood gossip revealed that some of my neighbors were already using heat. In mid-October! How could they do such a thing after trying to sleep in the summer with noise and heat? The cooler the air the better you sleep, but only to a point . I merrily switched sleeping bags, put pants and socks on, and finally covered my head, but when I actually had to turn on the heat I felt profoundly defeated. Why take it so seriously? It wasn't just the seasons that transitioned quickly; so too was the switch from road cycling to mountain biking.

A front went through recently and produced this. I've never quite seen a cloud development like this.

Back East they complain that 'It's not the heat, it's the humidity.' I'm here to tell you that it's not as simple as that. Easterners suffer from such an excess of moisture over an annual cycle that they never think of the hardship of aridity.  I just finished a bicycle ride in enormous humidity by New Mexican standards: 60% in mid-morning. It only takes 30% to generate an afternoon thunderstorm. The fields have become green with all the rain and humidity lately. The Easterners yawn at this news. But not me. Soon my camera will go to work on fields full of seed heads, texture, and flowers. Bear in mind that in April, after a freakishly wet and snowy winter, everything was still brown. Some people's idea of sensual luxury is to go to a spa and be pampered with hot springs, massages, aromatherapy, etc. I'll settle for an experience like today: I didn't need to smear my skin with that crisco-like sunscreen, since the high humidity partly blocked the s

Wickenburg AZ, a couple winters ago. My noble experiment has hit a snag. I was trying to improve the winter RV boondock camping experience by tolerating cooler weather, in order to find prettier land and less crowded camping. But lately the weather has been wet, rather than just cool. I don't know if I could ever readjust to wet weather again. I wasn't the only the person standing on the bridge over the mighty Hassayampa "River", gawking at it. I took some photos but won't show them since there are readers north and east who refuse to be wowed by water flowing through a river.   The dogs and I headed up to Vulture Peak, right from the trailer door, by screaming up Cemetery Wash. It is amazing how you can play with dry washes and the ridges between them. Day after day you can walk the same basic area, but small variations make the loop interesting. There are a lot of horsemen in the Wickenburg area. Normally horseshoes are written intaglio into

Cottonwood AZ. Recently I had a windy night high over the little mining town of Jerome. It was a reminder of how difficult it is to sleep when the trailer is rockin' and rollin'. I wonder how many RVers considered living on a boat? I confess to having had that fantasy a few times. My boat fantasy never survives more than thirty seconds of scrutiny. What would it be like to sleep on a boat during a stormy night? As difficult as it is to sleep through wind, rain is even worse. The drops sound like BB's gradually drilling their way through the roof. Then the dogs decide they need a walk. Just the act of walking from my trailer to my van is a messy nuisance. Arizona was having an all-night rain, recently. It's no fun boondocking in soup, especially with the dogs, so I rolled into Walmart for the night. The noisy rain on the roof woke me, so I popped in a DVD movie. Outside sheets of water sloughed down the parking lot, with harsh pole lights glaring over

It's quite an experience this summer. After a decade of a Captain Ahab-like obsession about Dry Heat, I'm finally at peace with summer. Credit the snowiest winter in a generation. It seems important to follow through on this breakthrough. We are after all naked apes, adapted to hot African savannas. We are supposed to be at peace with warmth. In cold weather we can never really relax; it is an enemy we must always be on the guard against. A friend told me once that when he lived in Florida he survived by taking four showers per day. It took some real effort to force myself to take merely two. Why was that so hard? Can trivial daily habits really be so hard to change? The next nail in summer's coffin must come from sleeping hours. When you live at an altitude of 6000 feet in a dry western state, it gets nice at night, no matter how hot the afternoon. Thus we have perfect weather for 18 hours per day. Why sleep through half of them? More than anything else, gringo sl

This year, June in the Southwest is living up to its reputation of monotonous, cloudless skies and fierce Dry Heat. Normally I would be miserable during weather like this, and look forward to the monsoons later in the summer. But not this year; winter really did cure me of piteous whining about dry heat. All it takes to enjoy an afternoon like today is a small gift of shade, sacred Sombra. The breeze does the rest. 'Wind' and 'spirit' (breath) have quite a history together, which a good dictionary or Wikipedia can tell you about. I've tried to shelter the Wind from its many assailants and detractors. If my eloquence failed, then seek your own in spir ation in a chair, outdoors. The wind coats and cools every inch of your skin, like a mountain stream does to a rock in its middle.    Remember when you were a kid and trying to exact revenge on a sibling or playmate; Mother would shake her finger at you and say, "Two wrongs don't make a right." But in

Western Colorado. As much as I love afternoon clouds during the monsoons, autumn rains are completely different. So I fled the upper Gunnison River valley for the torrid lowlands of Montrose (6000 feet) and the Uncompaghre River Valley. But it was stormy down here, too. East of the river there are shale badlands which turn into a quagmire when it rains. I have written before of how much the right book or movie can combine with the right location. With the San Juan Mountains in the background, this seemed like the time to watch "True Grit."  Soon I found a low BLM mesa to camp on, about thirty miles from where much of the mountain scenery of True Grit was shot. At a couple times during the movie, I stepped out of my trailer to admire specific mountains and rocks that were prominent in scenes in the movie. A couple days later another autumn storm blasted the San Juans, as seen from my RV boondocking campsite: The next day they were snow capped. I must ad

When traveling I try to experience a book, rather than merely read it. With some luck a traveler's location can add something chemical and explosive to the book. This happened to me recently in Leadville, CO. I was camped by a national forest road that was on the race course of two separate races that featured the most amazing athletes. My mind drifted off to Greek Olympic athletes. I picked up a book on Greek mythology, and was amazed to find myself actually interested in that silly nonsense, for the first time. Other things contributed to this chemical reaction, such as monsoon clouds accumulating before their mid-afternoon schedule, and lightning strikes so close to my trailer that they sounded like a shotgun blast outside the trailer door. So I was willing to play along with reading about Zeus the Cloud-Gatherer and Thunderbolt-Thrower. If this seems too whimsical for the reader, remember that your mind and body are the same as the homo sapiens of a few thou

Eighty percent of the discomfort felt by a full time RV boondocker occurs during summer. It needn't be so. Step One is to stop going north in summer, as counter-intuitive as that is. Going north will only keep you cool during the shoulder seasons. Would that they lasted longer than a couple weeks! Shame on me for taking so long to realize that latitude is a secondary variable and that altitude is preeminent. Through a geographical accident, most of the high altitude towns are in the Southwest. It's easy to underestimate the pleasantness of the southwestern monsoon season, from early July to mid-September. Even before the afternoon sky-and-cloud show, the higher humidity mutes the sun. By noon cumulus clouds have formed foamy white tops and darkling bottoms. Their bottoms darken as the vertical development continues. Finally they flocculate into a thundershower -- transient, local, and topographic. This praise of clouds and rain must seem surreal to those of the P

When gasoline started getting expensive in the mid-Aughts, I stopped dragging my trailer to the Northwest in the summer. Would I really be able to stay cool in the Southwest in the summer? Soon after praising my high-mesa campsite near Santa Fe, we were hit by a violent thunderstorm. I should have realized the edge of a mesa is a vulnerable location. We abandoned the trailer and went to the van, thinking that it was electrically grounded better. At least it didn't have any propane tanks. If we had been in the trailer, the little dog would have been hiding behind the Thetford toilet. In the van, he just sat on my lap and quivered. I can't help believing that the standard theories about the domestication of wolves are wrong, and that it was thunderstorms that drove the Wolf to Man and the cave. New Mexico is having an unusually wet and stormy early-summer. Normally it's oppressively cloudless, and so arid that it sucks the spit right out of your mouth. Finger tips a

It's hard to believe what happened on my first day of blogging. But this is a true story... Central New Mexico. We visited an old Spanish church at an Indian pueblo, built in the 1600's. It is easy here to imagine yourself far away in time and place from the drab uniformity of modern America. Why, we might as well be watching the movie, El Cid, with Charlton and Sophia. Other than the Fortress of old Quebec City, where can you experience anything like this in North America? This fine old church was starting to redeem a day that had not started too well. We found plenty of fine, high-altitude land and beautiful old ruins. But there was barely a grocery store to be found--or a wireless internet signal. So we continued on our way to the old imperial outpost of Santa Fe. Halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe I suddenly realized that my worries about staying high were over. I hadn't checked the weather this morning because there was no internet. So it was pu