Category: Albuquerque & New Mexico

The New York Times, “On a Dusty Mesa, No Water or Electricity, but Boundless Space.” An excerpt:

Now home to more than 400 families, the [Pajarito] mesa is one of the largest communities, other than some along the Mexican border, to survive entirely off the grid — without running water, electricity, streets or mail. Here is a maze of unnamed dirt roads, with nary a grocery store or barbershop in sight. Adding to the sense of dislocation, Albuquerque’s skyline shimmers, Oz-like, on the horizon, a half-hour’s drive away.

Pasó por aqui, el adelantado Don Juan de Oñate del descubrimiento de la mar del sur a 16 de Abril de 1605.

It was on this date in 1605 that European vandals first started tagging the rock face at what is now El Morro National Monument.

In English: “Passed by here, the adelantado Don Juan de Oñate from the discovery of the sea of the south the 16th of April of 1605.”

1605, before Jamestown and before the Pilgrims had even migrated to Holland on their way to Massachusetts.

“[H]ere’s a roundup of the best patios for partying, posing, pastries and passing the time.”

Patio Primer | Santa Fe Reporter

It’s snowing.

“A beloved Rio Grande Zoo giraffe was dismembered and placed in a trash bin following its death…”

AP via Huffington Post

The giraffe, Kashka, had suffered a debilitating leg injury after a recent fall. Zoo officials said attempts to treat her condition would not likely be successful, so veterinarians decided last week to euthanize the 16-year-old giraffe that stood 15 feet tall and weighed about 2,000 pounds.

A necropsy of the animal showed that in addition to ligament damage in her left rear knee, Kashka was in the initial stages of peracute mortality syndrome, a wasting disease that is common and usually fatal in giraffes but not well understood.

Kashka was born at the Miami Metro Zoo on Jan. 3, 1994. She arrived at the Rio Grande Zoo later that year and went on to have six calves over the years.

. . .

Instead of following protocol and taking the giraffe to the landfill, a zoo worker put the dismembered giraffe carcass in a bin near the zoo last Thursday. A garbage truck driver spotted the remains the next day and reported it to his supervisor.

I have reason to take this loss personally, even beyond the horrid and thoughtless disposal. I can’t be certain, but I’m thinking that Kashka is our own Momma giraffe.

28 degrees and about two inches of snow.

Just sayin’.

The Floyd Lady Broncos defeated the Cliff Cowgirls to win the New Mexico 1A girls basketball championship.

The Cliff Cowboys defeated the Tatum Coyotes to win the New Mexico 1A boys basketball championship.

Floyd, New Mexico, has a population of 78.

Cliff, New Mexico, is unincorporated. The high school (7-12) has 155 students and 12 teachers.

Tatum, New Mexico, has a population of 683, a booming metropolis.

Cliff and Tatum are each about 270 miles from Albuquerque; Cliff west of Silver City, Tatum east of Roswell. Floyd is near Clovis, New Mexico.

10:24 AM: I realize it is too warm for this to last, but it is snowing — I mean really snowing — at Casa NewMexiKen.

11:24 AM Sun out, snow all gone.

You know what we call this kind of weather in Albuquerque?

March

The Texico Lady Wolverines defeated the Navajo Pine Lady Warriors last night to win the New Mexico 2AA girls state basketball championship. I was curious about Texico High School, knowing the town to be a tiny place on the Texas-New Mexico state line (population 1,065 in 2000 and I doubt it’s grown much). Anyway, here’s an announcement left over from yesterday on the high school web site:

Lady Wolverines are victorious over Penasco in the State Basketball Tournament. They will be playing at the Pit in Albuquerque at 4:00 pm on Friday 3/12/10 against Navajo Pine. Texico Schools will dismiss at 11:50 am with the buses running at 12:00 pm.

I wonder how many made the 464-mile round trip.

This was also on the website and struck me as a part of America that most of us left long ago.

Please keep Lucero family and the Anderson family in your prayers for the recent loss of their grandmothers.

The word Texico is a portmanteau. That’s a blending of two words.

[Navajo Pine High School is on the Arizona border. The two schools are more than 400 miles apart.]

WTF, there’s snow on the ground.

The winter storm that passed through Albuquerque today had much more bark than bite — it did snow an inch to two twice today, but melted in-between and after.

Still, when the sun came out around 5, the Sandia Mountains had never been prettier. These two photos show the proximity of the mountains more than their beauty. They were taken at the nearby CVS, one from the parking lot and the other from inside while I waited for a cashier (it is CVS).

Click either photo for larger versions.

Oh, it’s raindrops hitting the sunlights. I’d forgotten the sound.

When you’ve had only four one-hundredths of an inch of precipitation in five weeks you forget.

They’re suggesting a low temperature by morning of just a single digit.

That’ll make this morning’s 15 feel downright balmy by comparison. As it was, I got up around 5 to see why the furnace wasn’t working. It was worse than that. It WAS working!

This Day in History at History.com tells a story from 125 years ago today.

Elfego Baca, legendary defender of southwestern Hispanos, manages to hold off a gang of 80 cowboys who are determined to kill him.

The trouble began the previous day, when Baca arrested Charles McCarthy, a cowboy who fired five shots at him in a Frisco (now Reserve), New Mexico, saloon. For months, a vicious band of Texan cowboys had terrorized the Hispanos of Frisco, brutally castrating one young Mexican man and using another for target practice. Outraged by these abuses, Baca gained a commission as deputy sheriff to try to end the terror. His arrest of McCarthy served notice to other Anglo cowboys that further abuses of the Hispanos would not be tolerated.

The Texans, however, were not easily intimidated. The morning after McCarthy’s arrest, a group of about 80 cowboys rode into town to free McCarthy and make an example of Baca for all Mexicans. Baca gathered the women and children of the town in a church for their safety and prepared to make a stand. When he saw how outnumbered he was, Baca retreated to an adobe house, where he killed one attacker and wounded several others. The irate cowboys peppered Baca’s tiny hideout with bullets, firing about 400 rounds into the flimsy structure. As night fell, they assumed they had killed the defiant deputy sheriff, but the next morning they awoke to the smell of beef stew and tortillas–Baca was fixing his breakfast.

A short while later, two lawmen and several of Baca’s friends came to his aid, and the cowboys retreated. Baca turned himself over to the officers, and he was charged with the murder of one of the cowboys. In his trial in Albuquerque, the jury found Baca not guilty because he had acted in self-defense, and he was released to a hero’s welcome among the Hispanos of New Mexico. Baca was adored because he had taken a stand against the abusive and racist Anglo newcomers. Hugely popular, Baca later enjoyed a successful career as a lawyer, private detective, and politician in Albuquerque.

Baca was 19 at the time of the shootout and lived until 1945. In 1958, Walt Disney Studios produced The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. Robert Loggia played the title role, with a cast that included Annette Funicello (as Chiquita), James Coburn and Alan Hale, Jr. (Gilligan’s skipper).

A golf tournament of sorts, the annual Elfego Baca Golf Shoot in Socorro, New Mexico, celebrates the deputy — “competitors are loaded into four-wheel drive vehicles to ascend Socorro Peak, 7,243 feet above sea level. Here they will battle in a one-hole shoot. The hole, a fifty foot patch of dirt, is located on the New Mexico Tech campus, about 4 hours long, 2550 feet down, and almost three miles away.”

You can read more about Elfego Baca here.

… was first published on this date in 1849. It bills itself as “The West’s Oldest Newspaper.”