In the Land of Enchantment

On Route 66! Finally, in the Land of Enchantment! Our search for New Greenland leads us to New Mexico – the land of scenic beauty, rich history and many unsolved mysteries.

Though New Mexico’s most famous residents are rattle-snakes and Tarantula Hawk Wasps, its first residents were courageous Asian hunters and gatherers who have arrived here at the end of the Ice Age, 20,000 years ago, after successful crossing of the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska. Little Jaaku is looking forward to meet his distant family here.

Our first stop in New Mexico will be Alamogordo - a place famous for book burning (2001: Harry Porter and Complete works of William Shakespeare were publicly burned by Christ Community Church as masterpieces of Satanic deception), hot air balloons launching and Space Shuttle emergency landing.

As the sun sets, we recall that 66 years ago to this day only steps away from here, in the Jornada del Muerto ("single day's journey of the dead man") desert, Manhattan Project was proven successful. I wonder if anyone was driving on the road like us, at this particular place, at the moment when “Trinity” was detonated, and if yes, what exactly did he see or feel?

Alamogordo is a home to many celebrities due to the presence of Holloman Air Force Base. Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, was trained here. And here at an altitude of 102,800 feet Joseph Kittinger stepped out from the balloon gondola in 1960.  The scientific work at Aeromedical Field Laboratory (AMFL) at Holloman AFB focused on the effects of cosmic radiation, fractional gravity, and mechanical forces on living tissues. That’s exactly what we are planning to do today with Little Jaaku on the White Sands Missile Range which is only 25km away. It is +41C this morning and we are ready for the another difficult and exciting day in the Land of Great Heat.

White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) is a rocket range of almost 3,200 square miles. It started as a playground for testing V-2 rockets captured from Germany (along with the German scientists and engineers associated with the V-2 development program, including Dr. Werner Von Braun). Captured rockets and scientists were kept and tested here.

White Sands Missile Range surrounds the White Sands Dunes from both sides making it look like an oasis in the middle of the battleground. But it is only an illusion: several times a week Dunes are shut down due the missile range tests. We are trying to sneak in and get lost in the sands before V-2 missiles are sent over our heads.

For those who have not been here before, I need to admit that the White Sand Dunes are really white! They are much whiter than on this picture! White Sand Dunes are as white as snow in Uummannaq at the beginning of the season. This is how white they are!

You can walk on white sands bare feet even on the hottest day. White sand feels cool and pleasant. This is because the gypsum unlike quartz does not easily convert the sun's energy into heat. Being here feels really strange: as if your head and feet belong to two different climate zones.

Before our venture into the White Sands begins, we equip ourselves with a GPS, compass and a mirror (in case we are lost or captured like many others before us, we can send a signal by shining in the sun so that people in Uummannaq can spot our location and save us). By the way, thank you, Aalibarti! For those who have not noticed, it’s his famous seal hunting mirror!

Waves of white sand remind us of frozen waves of Uummannaq Bay.

Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq - a wise and caring man - knew exactly what he was talking about when he suggested that in our journey across America must start with White Sand Dunes. He said that we should see it before we see anything else – Statue of Liberty or swamps of Mississippi.

Welcome to the waterless world!

Dunes  - like sea ice -  are always shifting, always changing, always moving. And the fastest of them are moving at a rate of up to 30 feet per year. They always move forward – under the force of gravity. Most of the dunes here move to the northeast.

So, you too have to move fast to survive, otherwise you will be eaten alive by the voracious dunes.

Faster, faster! Damma!

I guess the trick here is to be tall. Or sprout a tall fancy stem our of your short body.

Some plants succeed to over-smart the dunes by adapting – they keep moving together with the dune – literally on its back.

Here, in the White Sands I again think of Hivshu: “Wonder, accept and adapt.”  Our mission today is to blend with the sand and to move on with the sand!

But the reality of life here is that even those super-smart creatures who have adapted to this environment thousands of years ago still have to struggle to survive.

Many lose the battle. This little bug died earlier this morning. Before sunset, the great white sand will absorb him fully.

Death is near, but life is too. Someone before us had a perfect breakfast here at the bush, and here is the proof.

But most of the life during the day, of course, proceeds underground. It’s invisible to us; we can only try to reconstruct it in our imagination by reading the great book of desert.

Dwarfs and Giants.... little orphans... and other creatures...

We are looking specifically for the traces of a bleached earless lizard and distinct X-shaped tracks of a roadrunner. Unlike most birds that have three front toes and one back toe, the roadrunner has two front and two back toes. That’s why it can run faster than anyone.

But sand storms and high winds erase the foot-prints quickly:  of animals and humans alike. Nothing stays... except for this Big Heart that we drew with our feet in the middle of the White Sands. 

We draw Ummat - the Heart - and then plant the Flag of Greenland on the highest Dune we can find...

... and then head to Carlsbad Caverns – a subterranean wonder-world that will hopefully offer us a temporary escape from the Heat.

And just miles away, we find ourselves in a little Switzerland  in the Rocky Mountains: pines , fat green grasses,  birches and a pleasant +26C! America is all about diversity! And that's exactly what we love most about this country!

Hoover Dam, Meteo Crater and the Boneyard.

Away, away from Nevada and all its countless hazards to the sunny state of Arizona! And our first stop here is, of course, Hoover Dam!

At the entrance our car is being stopped for inspection by the vigilant Hoover Dam police that makes sure that we are not carrying illegal aliens or explosives: bombs, etc…

Of course, we do not. We couldn’t care less about bombs; instead we are carrying the glorious Flag of Greenland, which in a matter of minutes we will plant on top of the Dam!

It is +43C this morning and we are about to climb the height of a 100+ story building. This is not an easy task. 725 feet up – that’s how high Hoover Dam is. But the newly built Hoover Dam Bypass stands even higher – dwarfing the Dam itself.

From here you can easily ascend to heavens. Winds are brutal here. During our ascend we almost lose Little Jaaku to one of the furious gusts.

At 11:35 we plant the Flag of Greenland at the summit. Now we look at Hoover Dam from above. Stuck in the middle of the desert it reminds of a colossal monster too heavy to move. Hundreds of humans, like microbes, are constantly crawling up and down its cement spine.

As we leave Hoover Dam police is watching us with precision. But indeed, there is nothing more solid than Hoover Dam. Nothing, absolutely nothing can break it. Maybe only an asteroid or a meteorite. And that’s why our next destination will be a Meteo Crater   - a place where a tiny asteroid travelling at 18 km per second collided with Earth some 50,000 years ago.

It’s hard to understand why such a quiet and boring place like this had attracted the first and best preserved meteorite in America.

Look at this giant hole in the ground, nearly a mile across and over 500 feet deep! Feel the Impact! But of course, we have seen holes bigger than this one: in Siberia. Tunguska Blast in 1908  produced a crater 45 km wide!

Daniel Barringer, a mining engineer from Philadelphia, bought the Crater in 1903 and drilled a 1,400 foot deep hole to find gold and other precious metals. He found nothing and died soon after he ran out of money. But now the family business is flourishing since millions of tourists are buying “Crater Dust” and other goodies for 10 dollars a bag.

50,000 years have passed since, but nothing still grows here, and nothing lives. 

 I wonder what kind of clean-up is necessary to make this land livable again?

Unattractive for animals and plants, this place still lures humans. Astronauts scheduled for the Apollo Moon Missions trained at the Crater in the 60-s. And here is the evidence: a cardboard cutout of a fellow in a space suit next to an American flag in the very center of the Crater and a test capsule named Boiler Plate 29A which NASA gave to Barringer family as a gift.

To our deep disappointment, not a single person whom we interviewed along the perimeter of the Crater knows “How far is Greenland?” One visitor from Utah suggests that it is in Colorado. So, in circumstances given we just can’t leave without planting the Flag of Greenland at the bottom of the Crater. But this is not an easy task. The bottom of the Crater is out of reach: Barringer family does not want anyone even close to it. The only solution is to plant it from the distance.

 We use a miniature copy of a Greenland Flag and a little Indian arrow that we bought in the local Indian store as a carrier.

 In a blink of an eye our little flag is gone with wind! If you enlarge the screen you may see it  - right in the center of the Crater.

From Meteo Crater we drive to another major graveyard: 'The Boneyard', an aerospace storage and maintenance facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. This is the place where old fighters and bombers  come to die.

Local air – dry and clean – makes Tucson’s Boneyard an ideal place for afterlife. There is literally no corrosion and the soil is so firm that even the heaviest of the planes do not sink.

It is +45 this morning. The only shade we can find is under the dead jet.

Here Little Jaaky finds a match: the world’s tiniest airplane that looks like a little bee. The Starr Bumble Bee I.

And here he also gets to sit on the B57 Nuclear Bomb.

The day in Arizona brings new emotions and new friends. And finally we discover people who not only know ‘how far Greenland is”, but can also locate Uummannaq on the map. Young and handsome NATO fighter pilots from Norway befriend Little Jaaku and take him out for dinner at a local diner. Their relationship with Greenland? Simple: they fly in the Arctic and constantly they see Greenland under the wing.

From the Graveyards we head to Petrified Forest. It straddles the border between Apache County and Navajo County in northeastern Arizona.

It is famous for it fossils, of early dinosaurs and especially of fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic period of the Mesozoic era and that many people living today are still trying to steel. Why would anyone need a petrified tree at all?

It is so hot here, that Little Jaaku is being slowly petrified. People wandering around Petrified Forest are genuinely nice to us. Every single person is trying to touch Little Jaaku and everyone compliments his fabulous polar bear pants. But still no luck in achieving our main mission: finding out “how far Greenland is”.

As we are being checked for stolen petrified trees in the trunk of our Beamer, a massive thunderstorm shakes the ancient Petrified Forest and a much welcomed rain falls on our roof.

Thunder, rain and then finally - a double rainbow growing right out of the high way. It moves as we move, reminding us once again that life is a happy illusion.

We are on our way to Coconino National Forest, we stop in the local Indian stores which are incredibly entertaining...

and buy cheap Indian blankets because cool Sedona with its chilling +18C is awaiting for us.

 Finally, after two more rains and three thunderstorms, we are in the Red Rocks of Sedona where many of Hollywood's classic westerns were filmed.

And here our search for Greenland in the sunny state of Arizona comes to an end.

We did not find Greenland, but we were happy with what we saw. Some parts of Arizona look like steppe, other parts  - like rain forest, and  other parts  - like a Moon. This is a great state to live in and to visit alike.