Go west, young man:  2013 vacation, Day 13

Thursday was another day of Endless Driving.  Starting point:  Durango, Colorado.  Ending point:  Amarillo, Texas.  Goal:  Get there, before dark.

FAIL.

Since L had decided not to challenge the high passes after being scared pantsless Wednesday, we backtracked south down US 550 to Farmington, New Mexico, where we missed the turn-off and wasted twenty minutes wading through endless sprawled-out suburbia.  In the downtown we did see one pre-1930 building decorated with pre-Nazi swastikas.

We abandoned 550 and took up with US 64 to get us across northern New Mexico.  It did, but not without incident.  At Dulce, center of the Jicarilla Apache reservation, I noticed the right rear tire looked really low.  Not only was it low, it had been that way for long enough to wear the tire bald, and we did not need to be going across sparsely-populated regions with bald tires.  Fortunately, the “Apache Travel Center” where we had stopped had a full garage attached, and they had a new tire the right size.  $100 and a half hour later, we were ready to go again.

We reached Chama just about in time for lunch, and in time for me to look at more trains.  Chama is the southern terminus for the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, with equipment that simply didn’t survive elsewhere.

The most spectacular pieces were two of the four rotary snow plows that once belonged to the Rio Grande.  OM, the one in front, is the oldest of the lot, built in 1889.  Behind it was plow OY, built in 1925 and the youngest.

The rotating cutter blade on OM.  It’s more than nine feet tall.  When it went out, it took two engines to push it and several cars of supplies to keep it running.  The last time either plow was under steam was in the 1990s, when OY was used for line clearance up to Antonito, Colorado.

The Chama yard is also notable for retaining its coaling tower and water tank.  These were generally torn down with the coming of dieselization.

The shops at Chama only have two stalls, and one of them was occupied with a loco undergoing an overhaul.  I think it was engine 497, whose tender I later discovered off at the other end of the yard.  In the second photo you can see that almost all the instruments and controls have been taken off the backhead, except for the main boiler pressure gauge.  While I was taking pictures, the man in the photo started to climb down from the footplate, missed his footing and tumbled to the ground almost at my feet!

I spent more time wandering around the yard than I should, which put us behind after lunch.  Fortunately, there was nobody on the highway, just Dramatic Clouds that built up but held off raining until we got to Taos.

Taos started more miles of whiplashing mountain road and canyons, making a big circle around south of town toward Angel Fire to avoid the Taos Pueblo reservation.  Speed limits dropped to as little as 25 in places.  To complicate things, the Dramatic Clouds started to dump rain on us.  We also had to play tag with a garbage truck that was out picking up dumpsters from park campgrounds.  L was driving, and I was fuming at how much farther our crawling pace was putting us behind time.  I estimated we wouldn’t get to Amarillo much before midnight.

And after one additional round of frustration, caused by a road paving project that had traffic cut to a single one-way lane with flagmen, we got free of the mess at Cimarron, best known as the nearest town to the Philmont Boy Scout ranch.

And the road stayed empty, which was good.  I convinced L not to follow 64 up to Ratón pass, which was miles out of the way to the north, and instead cut across a state highway and got on US 56 to Clayton, which is the last place in New Mexico before you get to Somewhere Else.  “Somewhere else” in this case was Boise City, Oklahoma; M managed to persuade L to drive into the Oklahoma panhandle before we turned south, so she could say she had been in Oklahoma.

I had taken over driving at Clayton when we stopped for supper, and I was hooking it over the highway and steaming over all the delays the day had brought.  We did make the detour into Oklahoma, and because it was almost full dark we started noticing lots of strobe lights flashing, on both sides of the highway.  We knew that there couldn’t be any airports out there to explain as many strobes as we were seeing, and they were too close to the ground to be antenna aviation lights.  Finally L worked out that the lights were on irrigation pipes in cultivated fields, and we later learned that the strobes were to make it easier for farmers who irrigate at night to see whether the irrigation was running properly.  If the light stops flashing, he knows something is wrong and goes to see about it.

At last we turned south toward Texas on US 287 at Boise City.  (We had to make two circuits of the square before we got straightened out and pointed right, due to confusing signage.)  287 turned out to be one of those truckers’ highways, full of semis going from I-40 up to Denver.  However, most of them were oncoming traffic and the highway divided after a while, which made it a little easier.

We raced along through all those sparsely populated “thirty-mile” Panhandle counties.  At Stratford in Sherman County we went past a huge cattle slaughterhouse, and L remarked that she could smell blood from it even inside the car.  All of these towns, county seat or not, could barely muster two thousand people, and that’s small.

But even Highway 287 had to end, and we came to Amarillo at 12:15, just about as I had predicted.  Fortunately we didn’t have to hunt around to find our motel; it was right at the first exit off I-40.  We got checked in and fell into bed.