triangulation

Independent Field Exercise (November 3, 2010)

Laguna del Perro (Dog Lake)—On a wind-blown, empty stretch of Highway 60 east of Willard, twelve miles northwest of the geographic center of New Mexico, are Las Salinas of the Estancia Basin. These are numerous salt lakes that stretch from just south of the highway approximately18 miles north towards Estancia. Curiosity drove me to this desolate otherworld of gypsum, limestone, halite, and clay. The low rolling hills of the brown-green desert scrub suddenly turn vast and chalky as the highway rounds a curve, plods up a hill, and deposits me at a bullet-ridden highway marker, the only apparent place to view this natural wonder.

I took an easterly drive on Highway 60 to get to the salt lakes, stopping at Abo, one of the Salinas Pueblo Missions, along the way. In 1598, Juan de Onate arrived in this area to colonize it. Salt from the salt lakes was mined by the Spaniards using slave labor from the pueblos, and was used not only for preserving food and tanning hides, but was also highly valued for its use in silver processing in Mexico’s Chihuahuan mines.

12,000 to 24,000 years ago, a 40-mile long, 23-mile wide, 100-foot deep lake stretched across the Estancia basin. Changing climate conditions caused the lake to dry up. However, approximately 10,000 years ago, conditions became wetter again, and water collected in this area again. But, having no outlet, as it did not flow out to any rivers, the water became saline over time, and this is how it remains today. There was some water in the lakes, and the ground on the approach to them was water-saturated. (Even though access was prohibited by barbed-wire fencing, I felt compelled to, and did, investigate this stark terrain from close-up).

The alkaline, hard-scrabble landscape, and its rusty, salty lakes several hundred years ago provided the indigenous people of this land with a necessary preservative, substantively improving their way of life, yet was aligned with natural processes and cycles. The Spaniards with their religion and their silver riches came along, colonized the pueblo people, became proprietors of the salt, and in 1672, forty years after they erected their first mission on pueblo land, drought and famine drove the Spaniards and the pueblo people from this area, and it was abandoned.

Today, visitors to the Mission Ruins (The Salinas Pueblo Mission sites include Abo, Quarai, and Gran Quivira) walk on tidy asphalt trails to observe partially excavated ruins of the pueblos and the churches that were built along side of them. The salt lakes are inaccessible and completely fenced off. The High Lonesome Wind Ranch, with its forty wind turbines sending electricity via the Four Corners to Arizona, sits on a mesa just south of the lakes—tall white sticks reaching to the sky, their three-blade propellers turning—the only moving things for miles in any direction (other than the occasional freight train and a rare vehicle on Highway 60). On this stretch of highway, I navigate past, present, and future.