Double Blind

On Sunday February 13, 2005, I had the opportunity to explore the area of Arizona and New Mexico, and covered an insane amount of distance on my rental vehicle. When approaching the New Mexico border on US-60 from Arizona, it was already in the late afternoon and I realized I had long since run out of time to get back to Los Angeles in a reasonable time. I was also concerned about the temperatures – my GPS told me that I was over 7000 feet above sea level and the temperature was coming uncomfortably close to freezing. Having experienced snow driving around Barstow, California last December, the last thing I wanted to see was snow on my journey back to Los Angeles. However, I continued to speed eastward along the nearly deserted highways of New Mexico. In retrospect, I went way too far east, but at least I had 30 pictures to show for it.

After approaching Quemado, which is a nearly deserted town full of trailers, I turned into New Mexico Highway 36. After 20 miles of uneventful driving, I turned right onto Highway 117 and this developed into a lot of picturesque moments. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to stop and take pictures, so I took them all out of my car while going excessively above the posted speed limit. Since there were only two cars of oncoming traffic throughout the entire 80 mile journey, I had the two lanes completely for myself. I took about 30 pictures, of which about 10 of them you couldn’t even tell that I was taking them from a vehicle without very close inspection. The pictures should give the viewer an impression of the desolation of the area – I certainly didn’t want my car breaking down at this location, otherwise I would be due for a very cold stay inside my vehicle that night. I particularly like the third photograph, which gives you the impression that you’re about to crash into the rock face, but it actually turns left at the last second once the road dips.

I eventually did merge on Interstate 40 and got back to Los Angeles around 3:00am after a very exhausting drive.

The pictures can be viewed by clicking the “Read More…” link.

All of these pictures have been shrunk due to bandwidth considerations.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.