This morning we went on another wonderful family desert adventure. These have become common place and serve a couple purposes. In a SHTF scenario when you live like we do in a suburban area outside a pretty major U.S. city it is always very very important to explore the rural areas surrounding you. You need to know the best places to go if you need a short term place to ride out a storm (literal or figurative). It is also just plain fun. We love finding little explored areas and since this is the desert the amount of BLM land and other public land between populated areas is plentiful. We have gotten into metal detecting which adds to the awesome.
Back to today, lol. Today we took a new road (for us anyway) my BIL had discovered last week that he wanted to show to us. After some bumps and turns through the fairly level desert you hit an area of foot hill type hills and rocky outcroppings. Then you see a very rough pull out area and an interesting park visitor type fence. We got out here and walked around where we got to see some pretty beautiful rock formations and some gorgeous petroglyphs high on the cliffs. Who knows how the Indians who drew then got some of them up there but they were beyond beautiful. Of course us women folk took pictures like crazy! The trees were plentiful enough that I am also willing to be their is a spring of some sort fairly close and think the area needs more searching. If that is the case and it is still a live spring even if it is small it is a place to remember if short term running is needed. Our long term plan requires somewhere farther north with more hunting but in a pinch and to get us through something fairly short a nearby well covered, easily defensible, springed camp would be a good thing to have.
After our exploration and my husbands rather cute mad climb up a cliff after a very large lizard for our girls to see (He chased him into a hole and was only able to retrieve a tail, lol. Our girls have a lizard obsession.) we went back the way we came until we found a side road and could get adequately off the traveled path to pull out the weapons. We kept is small today as we needed to be back in town for other obligations and had in town plans for the evening. My guy had to let his visiting big sister shoot his special toy. He loves his .308 almost as much as he loves me, lol. BIL had a .22 rifle for the older female children. We also broke out the Karr .40 and my sweet SIL had the unfortunate luck to be slide-bitten. Youch. I took the time to put about 40 rounds through my 9mm. I think the empty Gatorade bottle trying to rob me was very unhappily stopped and dead. I need to keep up with practice but I think I did okay.
I went to college in New Mexico, at UNM in ABQ. North of the city there were petroglyphs on many of the rocks. Years later, my son and I went to Chaco canyon to see the ruins there and got some good pictures of petroglyphs as well. When I was at UNM the guys in my unit used to go out to Tijeras canyon and have shooting afternoons. Now it is all paved over.
ReplyDeleteMakes me sad when things like that are destroyed. We had a story here where teenagers spraypainted over some amazing petroglyphs. It has taken a year but they just were able to complete the cleanup without loosing everything.
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