April Serendipity Ramble

 

Occasionally my friend, Bruce Shah, and I just hop in the car and see what we can find out in the rural reaches of New Mexico.

Back in April we lit out for an area in east-central New Mexico bounded by Mountainair, Willard, Duran, and Corona, primarily along NM highway 42 (southeast of Albuquerque; see map below).

Our first stop was Mountainair Cemetery, about a mile west of town, which neither of us had visited previously and wasn't easy to find (not on a main road).  Similar to many rural New Mexico cemeteries, it held a few interesting gravesites and memorials:

Then we headed east to Willard (where we had photographed its cemetery on an earlier trip -- click here to see images from that one), and turned southeast onto NM 42.

About where that little "42" symbol is in the middle of the map above we found what's left of a town called Cedarvale, a farming community founded in 1908.  The town basically emptied out during the Depression, but before it disappeared, the WPA built a school that's still there (now abandoned).

At the Cedarvale school we left Highway 42 and drove northeast  along unpaved county roads to find the now-overgrown Cedarvale Cemetery . . .

. . . and the still-tended Pinos Wells Cemetery (which my friend, Alan Postelnek, and I visited a few years ago) out in the grassy, relatively treeless ranchlands.

As you might be able to tell from the flag, the wind was blowing about 30-40 mph.  That made it a good day for the wind turbine farms in the area . . .

. . . but it also meant dust was blowing everywhere:

We cruised into the small village of Duran (pop. approx. 35) where there are still a few old buildings, including San Juan Bautista church and a general store/hotel building owned by Anton Coury who was murdered in the building by robbers in 1921.

Photo courtesy of J.M. House's blog, "City of Dust"

You can read more about the history of Duran by clicking here.

From Duran we drove down Highway 54 to the town of Corona, where we stopped for lunch at the El Corral Cafe, a classic small-town New Mexico restaurant . . .

. . . complete with a poster for one of New Mexico's favorite flavors:

By the way, Corona was the town closest to the site of the crash of an unidentified device (weather balloon? flying saucer?) 75 years ago on July 3, 1947.  Roswell, NM, gets credit for the UFO because the U.S. Army Air Corps scooped up the debris and took it to Roswell Army Air Field 80 miles away from the crash site.

Having reached the limit of our excursion, we turned around and headed back up Highway 42 to Willard, where we took a little detour northeast on Highway 60 to chase the dust clouds and found this bleak scene:

Then we drove back to Mountainair and made a pit stop at Abo, one of three Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument sites.  Abo was built in the mid-1600s.  You can read more about it here.

We returned to Albuquerque in late afternoon -- a good day's journey.

If you would like to see these images in a larger format, please visit my photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, by clicking here.

Enjoy!