Four Corners Monument: Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona

Four Corners Monument is located in the Navajo Tribal Parks system and is the only location within the United States in which one can stand in four states at one time: Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.  Despite the fact that little else is located at the site other than the point and some interpretive plaques, when approaching close to the famous junction of the four states, it is an obligatory stop.

Below we are standing at the site of the famous junction.

And Sueshan places an extremity in each state...

The flags of each US state; New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, and Navajo nation occupy each quadrant.  The buildings surrounding the monument are shelters in which natives are selling jewelry, handmade arrows, tee shirts, and the like.

The marker denoting the exact location of the intersection of UT, CO, NM, and AZ below.

The interpretive plaques below explain some of the survey work over the past century and a half that has determined the location of the point.

Leaving Las Cruces

After spending a very relaxing and productive week with my wonderful aunt and uncle in Las Cruces it was time for us to get back on the road and continue our travels. Many thanks to them for all the wonderful hospitality.

We continued west towards Tucson, Arizona.

We spent a couple nights at Snyder Hill BLM. 

We visited the San Xavier Mission and Indian Burial Ground.  San Xavier Mission was founded as a Catholic mission by Father Eusebio Kino in 1692. Construction of the current church began in 1783 and was completed in 1797.  It is the oldest intact European structure in Arizona.

White Sands National Monument & Missile Range Museum

After surviving the sandstorm, we arrived very dusty in Las Cruces, NM to visit Sueshan's aunt and uncle.  They showed us around Las Cruces Wednesday evening, and have been feeding us well and showing us great hospitality ever since.

On Thursday we headed about 50 miles east over the Organ Mountains to White Sands National Monument.  White Sands is known worldwide as the largest gypsum dune landscape on Earth.  The mountains surrounding the basin are very rich in gypsum, and when it rains this mineral is carried into the valley below.  There is no river draining the basin however; it is like a bowl trapping the water.  In the hot, windy dusty conditions, the water evaporates leaving behind crystalline selenite, which is very soft and brittle.  The strong winds are able to break down these crystals into very fine white powdery sand, very pure and clean.  The winds drift the dunes 30-40 feet per year, and many plants and animals have adapted to life in this terrain.

The NPS Visitors Center at White Sands


As you travel into the dunes, the paved road ends and you are driving on hard-packed road plowed by front end loaders through the drifting sand.


The dunes look like a moonscape against the surrounding desert.

 

We had to attempt the obligatory long jump over the side of the dunes, adopted from tradition at Jockey's Ridge in the Outer Banks.

360 degree Panoramic video of White Sands National Monument

Honey, I shrunk the kids!

Just kidding, we know we tricked you with the visual illusion!

The picture below isn't great, but this is US70 traveling back toward Las Cruces, with the Organ Mountains in the background.  The Organs are very jagged, and gain their name from the resemblance to the pipes of a pipe organ.

On the way back to Las Cruces, we stopped at the other item for which the area is known, the White Sands Missile Range.  The Missile Range is the largest military installation in the United States, stretching something like 70 miles wide and 250 miles long.  Virtually every missile, rocket, or other explosive weapon used by the US since WWII has been tested here.  They have a small museum on base and a Missile Park outside, with many of the country's most utilized ballistic weapons over the past 5+ decades on display.

One of the most remote portions of White Sands Missile Range was also the location of the Trinity Site, where the world's first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945. The atom bomb was developed as a result of the Manhattan Project just a few hundred miles north at the highly secretive Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Trinity site is available for tours just one weekend per year in early April; at our closest point we traveled on one of the nearest publicly accessible paved roads to the site and were approximately 45 miles away.

Patriot missile launcher.

Patriot missile below...famous for shooting down so many of Saddam's Scuds.

The Beech King Air used during the late 1960's and 1970's to transport Dr. Wernher von Braun during his tenure at White Sands.

Elephant Butte

After leaving the Petroglyphs we drove south to Elephant Butte Lake State Park along the shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir. It is the largest state park in New Mexico and surrounds the state's largest reservoir.  Elephant Butte Dam, constructed between 1911 and 1916, was a major engineering feat in its day. The 36,000-acre reservoir, created in 1916 across the Rio Grande, is 40 miles long with more than 200 miles of shoreline.

The views were beautiful but the winds were brutal, gusting at over 50 mph.  I got a mouth, nose and earful of sand on several occasions!

Long Lost Airplanes

My great-grandpa, George H. Wolf "Jr.," owned two aircraft during the late 1940's until sometime just after 1960.  He passed away in the early 1980's, but I think I inherited some of my love of aviation from him, and I always wondered what became of his aircraft.  My great-grandma lived well into her 90's, and a few years before she passed away in the 2000's she gave me several old photographs, including some of her husband's later aircraft, a 1948 Cessna 170.  That further fueled my interest in the status of his aircraft and his international aerial adventures (to include Mexico and Cuba) of 50-60 years ago.

My grandpa, his son, remembered the registration number of his dad's plane, N4238V, and using this information I was able to track down the current owner in the late 2000's using the FAA Registration database.  After some research, I was able to track the aircraft to Dave and Ann H. of Los Lunas, NM, and I sent a blind letter to them along with copies of the 55+ year-old photos from my great-grandma that they now own.  A few weeks later I received a response from Dave, and he mailed me a current photo of the aircraft in top-notch condition.

Fast forward several years; during our trek through NM, Dave and I linked up and decided to meet. Dave retired from the Air Force after 24 years of service, then flew another 13 years for Southwest Airlines.  They now live in central NM in an airpark community, and have my great-grandpa's Cessna 170 at their favorite vacation spot in Idaho.  Dave invited us out to their home at the airpark, and showed us his Cessna 195 Businessliner he has in his hangar there.  We talked for several hours on a range of topics, then looked through the C170 records and located several documents with my grandpa's name on them from the 1950's.  It was amazing to see these documents over 60 years later, still in excellent condition, and accompanying all of the aircraft logbooks and records since new in 1948.

Though the aircraft is in Idaho currently, I was able to learn a lot about its history from Dave and Ann, and I'm hoping to be able to see the aircraft in person one day.  Dave switches out the aircraft from time to time, flying the Cessna 195 to Idaho and bringing back the C170.  I'm hoping our venture will one day cross paths with the location of N4238V, either in ID or NM.

Dave and Ann H. below, after welcoming us into their home in central NM.

"Best Cessna" award Dave won with the aircraft at an Arizona Fly-In in 2012.

Some photos of the aircraft, which had a full restoration in 1990.  Dave and Ann have owned the aircraft since 1992, and their son who has since graduated on to 747's, freighters, and an airline job learned to fly in it.

The C170 on the cover of a Cessna 170 Newsletter.  Dave is a Director of the NM Pilots Association and loves to fly both of his aircraft into relatively-undeveloped backcountry airstrips in both Idaho and New Mexico, pitching his tent and camping nearby.

FAA Form 337 with my great-grandpa's name as the owner of record.

Dated October 1952

The last document I located under his ownership, from August 1960.  An August 1961 record shows the names of new owners.

The original airframe log shows the brand new plane entered service in Oct 1948 in Commerce, GA.

Many thanks to Dave and Ann for inviting us to their home and for spending several hours talking with us about N4238V and many other  interesting topics.  We hope to see you again soon, and keep up the great stewardship of the old bird!