Morning

Roughly sixty thousand years ago, what would later become northeastern New Mexico was a lava field. There were flows of basaltic lava, three to thirty meters thick, covering hundreds of square kilometers. Volcanoes dotted the landscape.

The fault system now known as the Jemez Lineament cuts across New Mexico on a diagonal that begins near the northeast corner of the state, and runs south and west, into Arizona. All along this is a chain of extinct volcanoes and lava fields. Near the middle is Valles Caldera, a kilometers-wide circular forested valley which was once the mouth of a supervolcano.

But that’s a story for another day, soon.

The basaltic lava flows of the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field cooled with time, and became meters-thick caps of solid basalt, spread irregulary across the landscape. Over the next sixty millenia, water eroded the portions of the landscape that wasn’t a river of volcanic rock, turning the lava flows into the tops of mesas.

And we’re camping at a state park that is in one of the valleys between those mesas. But in between the thousands-of-years-long eruptions that produced all that basalt and us showing up yesterday to pitch camp, some other things happened.

In 1900, a railroad arrived nearby and established three coal mines in this canyon. Between the mines, which were on opposite sides of the canyon and dug eleven miles into the mesas, grew a town. It was a company town, which was home to about a thousand people at its peak.

They mined bituminous coal here, which was mostly burned in steam locomotives and furnaces for heating. As buildings switched their furnaces to fuel-oil, or natural gas, or electricity; and as locomotives switched to diesel-electric, the town of Sugarite…

Normally, towns decline as people move away and economic opportunities become available elsewhere. A lot of the time, describing this attracts stock phrases like “died out”. But Sugarite didn’t die out. Sugarite was a company town, and everything in it – the clubhouse where people gathered to socialize, the school, the store, and even the homes of the workers – was owned by the railroad.

So when it no longer made sense to mine the bituminous coal out of the mesas of Sugarite Canyon, the town of Sugarite didn’t die out. It was shut down, torn apart, and sold for scrap.

This morning, we woke up, had breakfast, and hiked uphill, through what little remains of the town (mostly just building foundations, quarried out of local sandstone and mudstone, and worthless to the railroad), to see the ruins of the entrance to Mine #2 and the cable house (the structure which paid out and took up the cables attached to the gravity-powered cars which transported coal downhill, to the rail line).

The morning was a warm one, and the only shade along the trail was the occasional juniper old enough to stand under. I’d never seen junipers that large – I thought they were universally short, round, and scrubby. They looked like willowy pines and smelled wonderful.

At the level of the mine entrances, there were fragments of coal everywhere on the ground. Scattered about thinly in some places, and carpeting the entire trail in others. That was the day’s second new expeirence for me: hiking on coal (which is lighter than I thought it would be, and has a sort of pleasing clink when struck).

Evening

Our plan for the evening was to attend an astronomy program at nearby Capulin Volcano National Monument, but the clouds which were so scattered and high in the morning built steadily through the day. By noon there were flotillas of cumulus arrayed across the southern sky, and by evening nearly the whole sky was heavy and gray again.

We repaired to camp, had a dinner of veggie chili dogs, and as I was nearing this point in my narrative, it began to rain again. We are now in the tent. I’m writing this entry, and Missy is reading a book I picked up earlier today.

It is called The Prairie Traveller, and it is a guidebook on how to cross the Great Plains, from the Mississippi or Missouri rivers to the Pacific coaast. It was written in 1859, by one Captain Randolph Marcy, formerly of the US Army.

We’ve both been fascinated by it because it is a wonderful/outrageous mix of anecdotes and strategems from one of the most romanticized periods of American history. It’s sometimes wonderful because some of the stories ring absolutely true as someone who lives in a part of the country which is frequently discussed in the book.

It’s sometimes outrageous because some of the stories are obvious outright fabrications which don’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. Also, there’s a lot of jingoism, colonialism, sexism, and Manifest Destiny going on in there.

A better title would be Captain Marcy’s True Tales and Stupifying Fabrications Regarding The American Frontier, for Problematic and Adventurous Gentlemen.

As a synecdoche, in the section on hunting, Capt. Marcy begins a discussion of bison by saying how only a decade ago they were uncountably numerous, but that he expects they will be completely extinct within a few more years. He then immediately proceeds to tell you where bison may still be reliably found, and how to effectively hunt them.

Dammit, Marcy!