I know you’ve all been secretly clamoring for some exotic Southwestern wildlife, so have a peek at this menagerie.

I’ve probably seen a hundred of these bad boys already.  Where the deer and the antelope play indeed.

Not very cuddly, but certainly exotic and cool by Midwestern standards.  This was the first rattlesnake I saw on the road that wasn’t, shall we say, “vertically compressed”?

This jackrabbit was hanging around US 60 by the Very Large Array.  (Don’t worry, I’ll get to that eventually.)

Drive around enough on open rangeland and eventually, you run into the occasional bovine roadblock.  One honk is all it takes to clear a path, though.  They understand that much automobile.

Finally my favorite was this horned lizard.  On a cool, cloudy morning, this dude was sitting by a roadside pullout hoping the sun would pop out and give him the energy to start his day.  The look on his face says, “It’s to cold to deal with you, buddy.”

It’s an annual event in the Southwest.  Warm, moist air muscles in from the eastern Pacific and Gulf of Mexico on the back half of summer and thunderstorms dump large volumes of rain on this mostly arid region.  Little stream beds, arroyos and washes that are dry for most of the year can suddenly surge with water as heavy rain screams off the steep slopes.

This year has been particularly intense for New Mexico and Colorado, too, as I’m sure you’ve all seen on the news.  This is apparently the wettest monsoon in at least 30 years for this media market.  It comes after the rest of summer was particularly dry.

The rain has been hampering my job in this state.  So far, we can pretty much bank on being boxed in by rain by 3 pm at the latest.  Several roads we need to collect data on are currently closed or otherwise unavailable.  On the plus side, it has made for some interesting scenery.

This is the San Francisco River just down stream from the small town of Reserve. It looks like a normal river except that just two weeks ago, it was bone dry.  (Note the high turbidity.)

A monsoon thunderstorm is just like one you’d see anywhere in North America.  What’s new to me is being able to see it coming for miles ahead.  Distant curtains of water ready to inundate this normally arid landscape.

A place that only gets around 15 inches of rain a year suddenly gets half of it in just a couple days.  It is an awesome demonstration of the power of water moving downhill.  Material is carved from the hillsides and sorted by size as water redistributes it on the valley floor.  This is how landscapes are created.

Lastly, a bit of humor from Pie Town.  (Seriously, it’s a real place on US 60 in western New Mexico.)

http://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.29474,-108.13302&z=14&t=T

Seems a local septic service has fully embraced its repurposed vehicle and created quite the brand identity in the process.  Perhaps this is Mr. Hankey’s extended family?

(reporting from I-25 exit 150)

But not enough to make it to the post season.  The Oklahoma City Redhawks took the division this year.

I speak of the minor league baseball team the Albuquerque Isotopes.  I made a day trip down to Albuquerque today to drop off one of our company guys at the airport and the ball park is right in the neighborhood.  So I stopped in to see what kind of merchandise I could score.  While I was disappointed to learn the season ended a week ago, when I was just leaving for New Mexico, I am the proud owner of a new hat and a sweet hoodie.

I was pleased to see one can meet Homer Simpson at an Isotopes game.  (Anyone who went to a large cineplex in the summer of ’07 might recognize that plastic statue.)

For those who don’t know the back story, on the TV show “The Simpsons”, their town of Springfield has been home to a minor league baseball team called the Springfield Isotopes since the very first season.  In a 2001 episode, Homer discovers the team’s owner is secretly planning on moving the team to Albuquerque and goes on a hunger strike until they admit it.  Two years later, Albuquerque got a minor league team to move to town and the name “Isotopes” won handily in a survey conducted by a local newspaper.  Given the state’s contributions to America’s nuclear program over the decades, they went with it and so the world’s greatest Simpson’s reference was born.

Pretty amazing how quickly you can get across a large swath of this continent if you want to.  In just 24 hours, I went from Des Moines, Iowa, to Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I’m a bit jet lagged (or van lagged?) but this seems like a fairly cool city.  They’ve really embraced that Southwestern Adobe style of architecture in these parts.  Nothing classes up a mundane strip mall like some tasteful arches and few earth tones.

I’ll be spending the majority of the rest of this year in this state and I think most of it is going to be pretty sweet.  Already the bosses are telling us we’ll need to get on some of the mountain roads right away before the snow starts flying at those higher elevations.  Expect cool photos to start showing up by this weekend.