Notes from Westwater
We stood on the edge of Road Canyon on Cedar Mesa, peering down at the bottom. It was mid-April, and the brilliant claret cup cacti were blooming.
The short-cut to the Seven Kivas Ruin didn’t boast an official trail, but rock cairns marked the way. I’m not sure why, but I feared I would die on this...
Years ago, my older brother, born and raised in Kansas, decided he wanted to move his family to a cohesive Latter-day Saint town in Utah.
He looked at a Utah map and decided that either St. George or Blanding would fit the bill. Whichever town offered him a job first, he said, that’s where they’d...
Death Valley, according to the official pamphlet, is the hottest place on earth with the highest temperature recorded on July 10, 1913 at 134 degrees Fahrenheit.
It’s also the lowest place in North America at Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level, as well as the dryest, receiving an average of 2...
I came around a two-story ruin of a bank in Candelaria, NV, a mining ghost town, and was startled to find Ted in conversation with a man who had his hands full of treasures.
“I’ve been to other ghost towns,” he said, “but I’ve never seen so much trash.”
He showed us fragments of dishes, nails, and...
We stood peering up at one of the inscriptions on El Morro, a gigantic sandstone monolith in New Mexico. The words read, “Paso por aq[u]i el adelantado Don Ju [an] de Oñate del descubrimyento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605.”
Translation: Governor Don Juan de Oñate passed through here, from...
Salmon Ruins was an Ancestral Puebloan village occupied approximately from 1088 to 1290 A.D when a fire destroyed most of the buildings and killed 21 children and four adults.
We pulled into the parking lot of its research center located near Bloomfield, NM, the first stop on our spring bucket list...
“That’s probably far enough,” my hubby said, braking as we peered down the steep Eagle Canyon road. Our Jeep Patriot didn’t have high clearance, and its tires were worn, so Ted backed up and parked. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
“Sure.” I opened the door and stepped onto the tawny-colored road....
After we left the haunted museum in Clayton, NM, we drove to Carrizozo, hoping we’d left all ghosts behind.
Located on the northern end of the Tularosa Basin, Carrizozo is named after the reed grass, carrizo, with early settlers adding an extra “zo” to highlight its abundance.
Founded in 1899 by...
Ted turned off the highway onto a two-track trail south of Clayton, NM. With the help of a kind landowner, we’d first located the Evans Ranch Cemetery in September 2025 when dozens of alien-looking grasshoppers hitched rides, clinging to our windshield, side windows, hood, mirrors, and antenna. Now...
Christmas is family. Those words decorated the plaque that our friends recently gave us, and as I put away the decorations, I pondered the importance of family, both past and present.
When I was a child, my family wasn’t rich by any means. My dad worked for Dillon’s Food Chain at their warehouse in...
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