Our Travelogue...

[4Cruisers]

Our plan was for me to meet @POTATO LAUNCHER in Romeroville, NM, where the Ozark Trail ended at its junction with the Santa Fe Trail. I was having some last-minute radiator issues so I got a late start from home. Well, not far from Santa Fe all three SB lanes of US 84/285 were closed due to a two semi accident and fire. So they routed all of the traffic through Tesuque on a narrow two-lane road. It took me about an hour and a half in stop and go traffic to get less than 10 miles from Tesuque to Santa Fe. The road is lined with trees for pretty much the whole route, so at least it was shady and cool. And much of the road is the old alignment of the Old Spanish Trail, or El Camino Real, from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo near the confluence of the Rio Chama and the Rio Grande. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail (U.S. National Park Service) dates back to 1598.

Needless to say we didn't meet up until Santa Fe, on the Old Las Vegas Highway (and the pre-1937 alignment of Route 66) just east of town. From there, we followed the old Route 66 and Santa Fe Trail to the Plaza in downtown Santa Fe. We parked on San Francisco Street and walked up to the Plaza for lunch at, you guessed it, the Plaza Cafe. After lunch we drove up the street for our official baton hand-off on the Plaza.

Here is an old photo (1800s) showing the location of our hand-off:

And in 1926, the year Route 66 was designated (although Route 66 was a few blocks south on Alameda Street):

Picture our two FJ40s where the two cars are on the left side of the street in the photo above.

 

[4Cruisers]

After the hand-off we headed north out of town following the old El Camino Real to US 84/285, then on to Pojoaque, where I turned west for home. Casey and his brother Tim kept on the highway towards Taos and points north.

The road west from Pojoaque heads towards a crossing of the Rio Grande and the Jemez Mountains.

Here is the old highway bridge across the Rio Grande at Otowi. It was built in 1924 and is on the National Register of Historic Places:

Just downstream from the highway bridge was this bridge, which carried the narrow gauge D&RGW across the Rio Grande. The line was abandoned in September 1941:

A little more than a year later, based on the recommendation of J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves chose Los Alamos as the Manhattan Project site for developing the atomic bomb, taking over the Los Alamos Ranch School, as well as many homesteads on the Pajarito Plateau.

The following photo shows the typical landscape along much of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. Otowi is at the head of White Rock Canyon (more on this later in the travelogue).

Just before the battery on my iPhone died I was able to take this photo from the Clinton P. Anderson Memorial Overlook on the Main Hill Road from Otowi to Los Alamos. Clinton P. Anderson was a long-term Senator from New Mexico who was influential in obtaining funding for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for many years. The photo looks across the upper Rio Grande valley towards the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo range (Blood of Christ, for the color the mountains turn at sunset).

 

[POTATO LAUNCHER]

Some more from the second leg. The painted cars are of the Cadillac Ranch just west of Amarillo.

 

[POTATO LAUNCHER]

The handoff to @4Cruisers in SantaFe.

 

[POTATO LAUNCHER]

Todays handoff went well. Met @PWCO70crusier in Salida CO at Classic Cruisers. Brandon was kind enough to let us Cruise the property when we arrived. Cool place with a large selection of vintage LamdCruiser parts. 168 miles roundtrip today to complete my legs of an awesome trek. Thanks @hecrod for the insperation to pull this off.

 

[sggoat]

So I am traveling a lot in May, but know that it's imperative to keep the batons moving forward. Luckily, @1911 and I both had a schedule opening and were able to coordinate a really fun handoff location: our Lone Star Land Cruisers monthly meeting in Dallas. The BBQ was good, beer was cold, and the day's iffy weather cleared up just in time to drive our luxury tractors across Metroplex traffic. Our club's own professional photographer, @chris777 was even there, and took two pictures that were particularly good. I'll share one for now, and am hoping to submit the other to TLCA.

I had never met Lee in person. No surprise that he is a great dude. After all, he's got a 40.

View attachment 1458910

This is what's called a hand-off--Ha!
These pics are absolutely great!

 

[sggoat]

A drive of about 30 miles farther on Hwy 199 through more of the Cross Timbers woodlands brings you to Jacksboro, the county seat of Jack County:





Jack County was one of the very few Texas counties to vote against secession before the War of Northern Aggression ("civil war" for you yankees. ). It is also the birth place of 4-H Clubs. Fort Richardson (mentioned above) was built nearby in 1868 to protect settlers from the depredations of the Comanche and Kiowa.

At Jacksboro, the road becomes U.S. Hwy 281. Another 40 miles or so of very pleasant driving through the oak woods interspersed with small family cattle ranches and dairy farms



brings you to the town of Windhorst, population 509. A nice little town of mostly dairy farmers, it was settled by German immigrants in 1891. the local Catholic church has a shrine, built and paid for by all 64 citizens that served in WWII; every single one survived the war and returned home, an amazing statistic considering many other Texas towns which lost 1/3 or more of their servicemen to WWII.



A point of trivia - Windhorst is only 10 miles east of Archer City, the hometown of author Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), who's book and later movie The Last Picture Show was a thinly-disguised autobiographical story about growing up around Archer City.

Only 8 miles more down 281 is the even smaller town of Scotland, Texas. You might think it was settled by Scots immigrants, but no, it was also settled by German immigrants, the same as its neighbor Windhorst. Scotland was named for its founder, Henry J. Scott. Driving through on US 281, you can't miss the only restaurant in the whole town, Thad and Paisley's. Lo and behold, there is a mustard '77 40 parked right on 281, and I pull in to find a movie crew filming my approach. Actually, it is @Fireman making the movie, and of course his nice mustard 40. After the traditional ritual Comparing of the Trucks ceremony, we retire inside the restaurant for burgers, chicken-fried steak, homemade pie, and Mud Tales.



Even though Fireman and I have never met (though we have attended some of the same TLCA events, notably The Roundup at Katemcy Rocks), it turns out we have many friends and acquaintances in common from the Cruiser and Mud communities. A testament to the small world of Cruiser aficionados. After finishing our pie, the two remaining batons are passed on for further travel to the west and north.







Thanks to Fireman for the good company and good conversation, and my portion of the travelogue tale is now at an end. I look forward to the next installments!

So, when will this "documentary" from Fireman make it to PBS??

 

[4Cruisers]

Took the grand dogs on a hike in the mountains, so decided to add to the travelogue.

This sign gets me every time:

This is on NM 4 through the Jemez Mountains, in Bandelier National Monument. The destination for our hike was further along in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, one of the newest additions to the National Park System.

Note the large chunks of obsidian used in the stone base of the sign. On a bike ride through the back section of the Preserve a couple of years ago my wife and I found chunks of obsidian larger than the biggest shown in the photos above.

 

[4Cruisers]

A couple more photos:

This is a shot from along our hike, which circles La Jara Peak. The cabin barely visible in the background is Sheriff Longmire's cabin in the TV series "Longmire".

This next shot is the "Missing Cabin", from the set of the movie "The Missing".

And a view looking northeastward across the Valle Grande, with the mountains above Los Alamos in the distance.

On the drive back to town, NM 4 skirts the upper end of Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier. The canyon is 1,100 feet deep here, from the highway down to Rito de los Frijoles, which flows through the visitor center area of the monument 12 miles further downstream.

This last shot is from the last panoramic curve before the highway drops down into town. The southern end of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range (and the Rocky Mountains) is in the far distance. The foreground is all in Bandelier, and the Rio Grande flows through White Rock Canyon from north to south, not visible in the photo. Santa Fe is at the base of the Sangres in the middle distance.

 

[4Cruisers]

Well, another wildfire in the mountains above town . So far this isn't one of the huge fires we've had recently, it doubled in size yesterday to 1,350 acres. The 2013 Thompson Ridge Fire burned 23,965 acres, including much of the area seen in the last four photos in Post #168 above, and the 2011 Las Conchas Fire burned 156,000 acres, including much of the area seen in the last three photos in Post #169 above. I ran across this photo online a few minutes ago:

For some perspective, La Jara, the small round mountain in the last three photos in Post #168, is near the left edge of the photo above, about a third of the way down from the top.

Hopefully they'll be able to keep the Cajete Fire from getting much larger, the southeastern edge of the fire has reached the Las Conchas burn scar, in the area where everything green was burned to ash. That fire caused the second mandatory evacuation of town in eleven years, it burned twelve miles towards town in only 5 or 6 hours.

Here are some photos I took from the roof of our house during the Las Conchas Fire:

 

[mrboatman]

Not Good !!

 

[Copenhagen1]

That last post by @4Cruisers is where a "dislike" button might come in handy!

Hopefully they will contain this new fire and minimize damage.

 

[sggoat]

I'd be okay if you just kept driving and storytelling... wonderful updates.

I would have to echo this 1000% I think this is what the relay is all about--all of us get to see the things we might never see--except through the eyes and commentary of folks who have been there--thank you!!

 

[4Cruisers]

While waiting for the weather to cool down a bit before my hand-off to @Reznugget my wife and I journeyed up to the inaugural Solid Axle Summit in Ouray, CO this past weekend. We drove up to Taos to meet up with some MUD members coming up from Texas. We decided to head up US 64 towards Angel Fire and pull off at a Forest Service campground by the highway to wait for @Mr Cimarron, @POTATO LAUNCHER, and the others.

We all stayed in Monte Vista the first night, where we met up with @NMC_EXP and his wife, who had driven in from Canon City, CO to join us for our drive over Stony Pass into Silverton. Now we had two blue FJ60s in our group.

We followed CO 149 past Creede and stopped at this restored mining structure.

Here's a shot along Forest Road 520 on the eastern approach to Stony Pass.

At the summit of Stony Pass, elevation 12,592 feet, courtesy of @POTATO LAUNCHER.

 

[4Cruisers]

The next several days were spent traversing the high passes of the San Juan Mountains in the vicinity of Ouray. The first day included Engineer Pass, California Pass, Hurricane Pass, and Corkscrew Pass.

Here we are parked at Animas Forks, between Engineer Pass and California Pass.

The second day was a loop trip over Black Bear Pass (elevation 12,840 feet) to the town of Telluride, with a return over Imogene Pass (elevation 13, 114 feet) to Ouray. I didn't take any photos because I was so focused on getting my wife and I back to town in one piece - Black Bear Pass has some technical sections that pucker you up something good, mainly due to the exposure.

The next day took us to the Blue Lakes Trailhead (elevation 12,500 feet) above Yankee Boy Basin.

The briefcase is now sporting a Solid Axle Summit sticker.

 

[4Cruisers]

The trip home took us over Red Mountain Pass back through Silverton, then up over Molas Pass and Coal Bank Pass to Durango. Here's a photo of Silverton from US 550 high above town. Note the two Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad trains in town.

From Durango we decided to take some back roads on the way home. A lot of the route followed the abandoned narrow gauge line that ran between Alamosa and Durango, known as the San Juan Extension. The last trains over the portion of the line between Chama and Durango were still powered by steam locomotives in 1968. Here are photos of some of the remaining structures along the Navajo River just to the NE of Dulce, NM.

From Dulce we headed south towards home. Much of the route is through the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation. We crossed the Continental Divide three times going through this beautiful high country.

 

[cbmontgo]

Awesome. I was at that exact spot in Animas Forks two weeks ago.

Great job keeping this going!

 

[roma042987]

thanks for posting @4Cruisers I saw the picture before I read your caption about Longmire's cabin and thought to myself "that looks like the meadow in front of walt's cabin" then read your caption. Pretty damn cool. I have all four seasons really like that show. Can you drive up to the cabin?

 

[4Cruisers]

thanks for posting @4Cruisers I saw the picture before I read your caption about Longmire's cabin and thought to myself "that looks like the meadow in front of walt's cabin" then read your caption. Pretty damn cool. I have all four seasons really like that show. Can you drive up to the cabin?

They issue a limited number of back country driving permits each day, but there's never been a problem getting a permit. The Longmire Cabin is right off the road a couple of miles from the visitor center.

 

[NMC_EXP]

Excellent thread.

The photos are giving me the itch to spend some time in New Mexico.....the list keeps getting longer.

Wanted to add that I appreciate the history info on these locales provided by 4cruisers and Potato Launcher. I enjoy the natural features but knowing the human part of it is important to me.