Cutting Loose

Saddled & bridled, booted & polluted leaving for NRA Whittington New Mexico as soon as I finish my coffee. For those of you headed for that high chaparral country I'll see you there this week.

@limbkiller if you change your mind and find yourself at the Albuquerque airport, all you got to do is call and I'll haul.

 

Dateline East of the Continental Divide & West of the Pecos (Grant NM):

Actually stayed in the motel last night; the wind blew and the sh!t flew; 15F & light snowing this a.m. tuck more newspapers under your coat and keep going. We're 1911Addicts aint we.

Saw a horrendous car wreck on the other side of the highway yesterday, with my odometer the traffic was stacked up 3.8 miles behind this



Here's a lousy car picture of a double rainbow that ended up looking like a reflection off the window, another reason way I'm not a fan of pictures from cars while getting coffee

 

Grounds keeping crew, Cimarron Inn & RV Park, Cimarron, NM





State 58 into Cimarron, with the right machine you could have serious fun straightening out the curves and curving out the straights, little to no traffic, twenty miles of heel and toe and flat out go

 

Overloaded Honda CR-V getting an amazing 36 mpg.

 

So I'm waiting on them with excuses and checking out the beautiful place called Cimarron NM, Nmbuzz may be one of the luckiest Jacks on this forum

 

One of the whacky things I always do when I travel somewhere is check out the cemetery as it can tell you a lot about a place.


Sometimes they can surprise you in that they get ready for Halloween way ahead of time

Other times they show you how hard a life them before us have lived; here a family lost four of their babies in a string. My Momma had a similar experience having my older sister, then lost three babies inside a year of their birth, but bonus-ed out having my older brother and me. These families had to be tougher than we know to endure this miserable hand they were dealt.

 

First volunteer arrives after a rough ride down along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, crossing 11,000 foot passes on that two lane black top, pushing down against up drafts and going with that back end slide through them ice covered sweeps, shooting dice on the black ice, safe and far from home:

 

Finally wcanterbury & nmbuzz rope the stump


Light rain, low cloud ceiling, entrance, you stop at the toll booth, I said hells bells and went for an annual pass, $30


Once you clear the toll you go onto a well maintained graded dirt road


You got a lot of choices at Whittington, here's some


You can rent housing on site, here's some


one of the ranges from afar


This is a rearward view of the entrance, the toll house, museum, reseach center, etc.


wcanterbury whacking steel silhouettes out to 150 yards with a CZ 452 Trainer




nmbuzz jacking about with a S&W 15-22 and knocking down all them steel targets, we ended up shooting 45acp & .22 RF handguns but they wont let me take pictures, they said to wait till the sun came out. I will say nmbuzz was knocking down 50 yard chickens with that 45, one for each bullet in his magazine.

 

They call New Mexico the Land of Enchantment, I call it the home on the range where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play, I took these pictures today


Breakfast chow line






You don't often see a picture of a deer with her mouth open


Pronghorn antelope AKA Speed Goat the fastest land animal in North America


Going home tonight I saw a bigger buck stuck inside the fence of the roadway, Pronghorns, fast as the are, up to 70 mph, can't jump or leap fences, they got to crawl under them, I didn't stop to take a picture as that guy was stressing out big time,


Halfway between Cimarron and Whittington is this necessary.

 

Some cool 1911Addict type guns at the Whittington museum

 

Here's one of my favorites.







Then this Colt wasn't to shabby