We're in Carlsbad, NM after spending 5 wild days at Davis Mtns State Park outside of Ft Davis, TX. We rode out a west Texas wind/dust storm on Tuesday with winds at 45 mph with gusts to 65 to 85 mph! It was kind of like riding out a hurricane with no rain or flooding.
The Alpine/Ft Davis/Marfa area is really beautiful. Amazing grassy plateaus with mountains in the distance. When you are out here it is really isolated. No cell phone, TV or net. One person told us it was 90 miles to the nearest Wal-mart...kinda nice! We took lots of hikes with the dogs on rocky paths that led up to high bluffs and the views everywhere were magnificent.
We visited the McDonald Observatory and saw the Harlan Smith 107" telescope (the world's largest when it was built in 1969) and the 1999 Hobby-Eberly telscope on the next mountain over, which is the fifth largest telescope in the world. We learned that the size refers to the diameter of the mirror in the telescope. Ellen got to use a remote controller to rotate the Harlan Smith telescope! It's actually done by computer when the astronomers are working. They have 80 people living on top of this mountain year-round studying the universe and maintaining the telescopes, plus visiting astronomers, all from far west Texas...pretty cool.
Today on the drive from Ft Davis to Carlsbad we were back in the west Texas/Chihuahuan desert. We went through Pecos, TX...no wonder Judge Roy Bean was such a grouch. It was a pretty desolate, depressing place.
We've added pictures of the Davis Mtns and the observatory to our web albums here: http://picasaweb.google.com/TxMike3
What was Marfa like?? Did you get to check out any galleries or see any of Don Judd's giant boxes?
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