New Mexico, Part 2

Dates: 4-12-21 to 4-13-21

 

Continuing through Santa Fe, we stopped at a curious roadside point of interest.  The aptly named Soda Dam crosses nearly the entire width of the valley.  Only the efforts of the road building crew, and the erosion of the stream have broken it.  Produced by a calcium bearing hot spring, it has migrated across the valley floor, creating an over-50ft-tall dam of deposited limestone.   At over 300ft wide, it is a fairly imposing wall.

 

Below is the active side, where hot water flowing over the top of the dome continues to deposit limestone, even while the stream has cut a channel below.

 

 

 

Someone created a few artistic reptiles from nails.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We took the afternoon to hike up Paliza Canyon.  Containing much of the same tufa rock which the cave homes were carved from, it is known for its fun rock formations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

The following day we visited a few of a few of the interesting areas in the Lybrook Badlands.  You can see why it was named a badlands area by early settlers.  The highly eroded region is all but impassible to foot and horse traffic.

 

 

 

 

 

These arid areas with alkaline soil often have very interesting plants.

 

 

In the sand these footprints tell the story of a fox hunting a mouse. 

 

 

A nearby area was the inspiration for painter Georgia O’Keefe’s “The Black Place”.  At times, it almost feels like another planet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, even here, tenacious lichens are right at home on barren rock faces.

 

 

The sediments of this area are almost entirely made from various volcanic discharges.  These flaking boulders were chunks of lava, blasted nearly a hundred miles from a long extinct volcano.  The lighter clays are mostly weathered volcanic ash, deposited in vast layers in eruptions that lasted decades.

 

 

Various minerals can be found in small chunks, likely blasted out of surrounding rock layers by violent explosions.  Hurling them far and wide.

 

 

We finished up our badlands tour by visiting “Hoodooville”, the site of hundreds of cool sediment towers.  The landscape was brutally hard to navigate, with sudden gulley's and wash outs abounding, and impassible features everywhere. 

 

 

The highly-erodible volcanic sediments create some stark vertical changes.  Whenever a piece of hard rock or sediment is present, it acts as a cap or roof, slowing or stopping the erosion of the material below.  This creates towers that exceed 60ft, often called hoodoos.