Tourist Stuff in New Mexico
The Wife likes animal sanctuaries. I tend to have mixed feelings about them myself. For one thing none of them are made with Photographers in mind-a dozen shots of chain link fences with blurs behind them are not really worth bothering with. Of course, that’s how some of these places make a bit of money, by selling Photo Op Tours. I tend to like the places that are nothing but Photo Opts-like a Volcano with an Ice Cave.
The Ice Cave is one of those private owned tourist attractions, but it has a lot of signs and well marked paths and I liked it. It was a bit chilly the day we where there, but the skies where clear and it was a near perfect day. On the way to the Ice Caves you walk through a landscape of lava flows and toppled trees. It seems once a tree reaches a certain height, the wind tends to knock them over-not much room for roots in the lava. Still, one of the trees was reported to be seven hundred years old-or was it older than that? It was an old tree in any case.
The Ice Cave itself was a kind of sunken pit with run off water collected in it. The temperature was always 31 degrees or cooler, or ice formed. This must have been a pretty nifty thing before electricity was all the rage. It’s kind of an odd sight, walking through the lava flows and then there is this big chunk of green ice. I liked it. But then, I like things like giant balls of twine as well.
At the same site is a volcano you can hike up the side of and peer into. How often do I get to hike up a volcano? Not very often. So we went up the side of this small mountain, and it was a bit of a struggle since neither The Wife nor I are exactly mountain climbers or hikers, though we do walk from time to time. It was a bit of a struggle at a couple of spots, but still not all that bad. The caldera of the volcano was an inverted cone with a few trees growing in it. There were several other volcanos visible from different spots on the trial, but they all looked just every other hill we had seen, so we were not as impressed as a volcanologist might have been.
The Gift Shop was much like all the other gift shops. Postcards, magnets, and all manner of Native American stuff. They even had display cases with all kinds of actual artifacts-boken pots and mugs and so on-I’m pretty they weren’t for sale, not that I would have had enough to buy any actual antiquities anyway.
The countryside was pretty, lots of interesting rock formations and lots of clouds drifting by. Down the road a ways was the Wolf Sanctuary. They had a Tour at 2 and we made is just under the wire. There were only three of us, and the nice British chap who gave the tour went into great detail about the life and times of each of the many wolves and partial wolves that were on display behind tall chain link fences.
Wolves and dogs can interbreed, but for the most part, they chose not to. Dog breeders, however, find buyers for these odd mixtures and do breed wolves and dogs. Wolves are not just big dogs, just as lions are not just big house cats. Wolves are hunters with built in programs to help them hunt. A case in point-
While one the workers at the Wolf Sanctuary was cleaning a cage, for no clear reason, one of the wolves bit hit leg. The wolf didn’t want to let go and the worker needed help to get away. He also needed 37 stitches in his leg. He doesn’t know what he did to provoke this attack, but the wolf will forever be punished for the worker’s stupidity of forgetting that wolves are still wolves, even if they do like to play fetch. Now no one will play with this wolf any more as they are in fear that she will attack them. This is just the kind of ignorance that got all the wolves into the Wolf Sanctuary in the first place. Why punish the wolf when it was just being a wolf?
There was one Wolf Dog that was mostly dog. It smiled and wagged it’s tail when we stood in front of it’s cage-whereas the wolves all gave us disdainful and disinterested looks and many of them made a point of urinating in front of us. But again, there was enough wolf in this very friendly looking animal that it might not be safe in the home environment.
I have mixed feelings about this prison for wolves, wolf dogs, and Reservation dogs-Native Americans are not big on penning any of their animals or controlling their breeding. They are in cages, some of them large cages, and they are given food and water. Some of them even have packs, but what kind of live is this? Better than being dead seemed to be the argument for the existence of the place. I guess these are the same questions you can ask of any kind of zoo, but most zoos don’t act as if they are following some higher calling-at least they didn’t when I was a kid.
The Guide was a nice guy and he talked about how the Wolves could not have survived in The Wild. Well, that’s the rub, where, EXACTLY, is this Wild you speak of? It was still pretty cool seeing wolves.
