Corralitos Road Run

Corralitos Road ' Not Quite Half-Marathon' Run

High on the flat mesa in the far distance is my goal, a white radar dome.

I'm not sure why I decided this was going to be a fun run, but when Wayne and I drove out here the day after my arrival in Las Cruses I became intrigued with running this stretch of highway. Actually I was interested in running the mountains in the distance, which is where the road before us in the picture above leads. However in order to make this a 'reasonable' run I had to include a good section of rolling desert road into the mix. Eight or Nine miles of it to be more precise.

When I first mentioned it, Janet had said she was going to come along and ride her bike. Wayne had brought a pistol along and he goes shooting off in a arroyo behind where I took this picture.
On the appointed day the weather was nasty in a Hawaii kind of way, and kind of nice in a Las Cruses frame of mind. It was cold and windy. But it was sunny as you can see. Janet decided she had better things to do. Wayne looked at me and laughed. I dressed in my cold weather gear and prepared for the worst.

When I first got started it was bitter cold. My hands were freezing, the wind was slipping into my clothing, and I was tight and in a nasty mood. I got to the top of the rise where I took the first picture and just swore and shook my head. There was no turning back really, I'd made a bit of a thing about running the road, so I just moved on, working out the tightness and putting up with the cold. In time my own body heat began to warm me, and I actually got into a bit of a pace.

I was reminded of a couple of Twilight Zone episodes as I jogged down the road. The first was the one where the guys stole the gold in 1960 and through some scientific trick managed to go into suspended animation for fifty or a hundred years. When they woke up they killed one another until only one guy was left, and he stumbled down a road like the one I was on, grasping a few bars of gold. A car eventually came by, and the guy tried to trade the gold for a drink of water. Then he died. The people in the car marveled that anyone would be so nuts as to carry around gold, which they were producing plentifully from sea water, or some such inanity.

Well the future was nothing like the episode, and gold is still tradeable for water. And the car those people were driving still hasn't been created. But wandering alone down that road with not another person in sight can be just as unsettling. The cold wind would shift occasionally, blowing directly into my face, and backing off to the north a bit. I saw a jack rabbit or two, there was a big red tail hawk that was soaring above me for a while, and some small birds, but mostly the critters were holed up some where, out of the wind and cold; only mad dogs and ultra runners, as the saying goes. Pictures

The farther down the road I ran, the longer it seemed I had to go to reach the distant mountains. The rolling desert has a way of unfolding before you, each time revealing a bit more of endless supply of miles of bleak road it hoards like gold. The only change was that the tiny speck of white that was the radar tower seemed to grow ever so slightly, and after an hour or so it had gone from the size of a grain of sand to pin prick. I took heart in that and moved down the road still not knowing how much road the desert had in store for me.

There are havalina out on these lonely rolling hills. Wayne and I had seen a sow and her young the first time out, and on this run I saw some hunters carrying one out of the range to the left of the road. They look like pigs, but are actually rodents, much like Kapibarra. They must be tough if they can survive out on the winter desert range, and eat those prickly pear cactus with the two inch thorns.

Aside from the hunters and some other trucks I didn't see much out there. I got a picture of a 'Watch out for Water' sign, which I felt was interesting given how dry it was out there. But Wayne assured me that when the rains come the water just 'sheets' over the coleche soil and runs like an sob. Some of the arroyo's showed evidence of that, and even the drainage ditches along the side of the road were often dug very deep by erosion. Out here there either is not enough water or just too much. The trick is keeping it around for a while. The counties dig and maintain retention dams and the roads that run out to them. They are the reason that cattle can survive out here.

As I got closer to the hills I began to run into more cattle. Higher up, even just a few hundred feet there seems to be a bit more grazing for the poor beasts and they congregate around the water pools and dry grasses. Every once in a while you see a cow with a bit of old longhorn in it an it is sporting a wide set of horns. Impressive. The cows were much like other runners at most of the ultra runs I do. They stared at me wide eyed and when I spoke to them they got really spooked and ran away. At least I know its an inter species kind of thing, an should take no real offense.

Anyway I finally reached the bottom of the hills, which are really low mountains. They were actually fairly steep and going up them was a challenge. I was quite surprised by how far I could see as I made it toward the top of the first of them. It was there that I recalled the second Twilight Zone, the one where the three astronauts crash land and think they are on some asteroid. Once again they have problems, and one guy kills his buddies to get all the water. He then comes over a rise and looks out on a scene cut by telephone lines. Information is neither good, nor bad, but you can get yourself into a real jam if you don't interpret it correctly.

There were two steep climbs and at the top of the second one I expected to be able to make my way up to the top of the mesa where the radar tower is. But it didn't work out that way. When I got to the road there was a gate with a bunch of signs on it telling me I could be thrown in jail or killed if the government felt I was a big enough threat. I really wanted to climb that hill, I had been thinking about it for hours, but I had seen an FAA pickup pass me so I knew there was somebody up there, and it was only a training run. I took a few pictures of the gate to prove I had a reason to stop and headed back to where Wayne was looking for arrow heads.

I forget what time I had told Wayne I would do the run in. I beat that, but it was nothing to brag about. I was just a run to keep me fit, and to see a bit of the land in that slow kind of way that runners enjoy.