Old Water Tank in New Mexico

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This old water tank stands behind the abandoned restaurant that I photographed at Exit 284 along I-40 in New Mexico, between Tucamcari and Santa Rosa. There were a couple of piles wooden railroad ties here. In addition to those in front of the rusty tank, there was another pile of them right behind the building. You see stuff like this all over rural areas of New Mexico.

 

[Keith]

Very nice ... I love old water tanks.

That's lovely country Chris, I find the colours very indemic of large parts of Oz with the bleached grass and stunning blue skies.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Very nice ... I love old water tanks.

That's lovely country Chris, I find the colours very indemic of large parts of Oz with the bleached grass and stunning blue skies.

Thanks Keith. This year, New Mexico was far drier than usual. When I lived there (I moved back to Indiana almost 4 yrs ago), the desert was a living place with lots of plants....mainly grasses like you see in the photo, but not all dead and dried out. Now, everything is dead because of the big drought that is affecting the whole western part of the USA right now. The blue skies have not changed though. You don't see anything like that in the great lakes/midwest area of the USA, where I live now. The sky seems bigger and bluer in the southwest.

 

[Phil_F_NM]

I love US 54 that goes kind of diagonally between Tucumcari and Wichita, Ks. That road and highway 285 between Vaughn and Roswell. Just desolate for miles.

New Mexico is indeed the land of cast off stuff like the water tank. Always making interesting photo studies with the remnants of the presence of people in the midst of pretty harsh desert. I like the photo, it reminds me of my hometown a bit.

Mom said that everything is green lately as they've had a lot of rain recently (well, a lot of rain for New Mexico.) I'm going to try to make it back for the Int'l Balloon Fiesta. I haven't frozen my butt off and gotten frostbitten toes while drinking hot coffee and eating a breakfast burrito in years.

Phil Forrest

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I love US 54 that goes kind of diagonally between Tucumcari and Wichita, Ks. That road and highway 285 between Vaughn and Roswell. Just desolate for miles.

New Mexico is indeed the land of cast off stuff like the water tank. Always making interesting photo studies with the remnants of the presence of people in the midst of pretty harsh desert. I like the photo, it reminds me of my hometown a bit.

Mom said that everything is green lately as they've had a lot of rain recently (well, a lot of rain for New Mexico.) I'm going to try to make it back for the Int'l Balloon Fiesta. I haven't frozen my butt off and gotten frostbitten toes while drinking hot coffee and eating a breakfast burrito in years.

Phil Forrest

Phil,

We drove 285 from Santa Fe to Roswell. It was my second time making that trip. I went to Roswell once when I lived there years ago because the girl I was dating at the time wanted to go there to visit a friend of hers who had moved there. Vaughn is an interesting town, I wish I had been able to spend more time photographing there. I did spend a lot of time in Encino, the town right before Vaughn, and I got some great pictures there. I did a few of the desolate landscape along 285 too. You never see such emptiness anywhere in the midwest. Indiana is densely populated, even in rural farming areas. I get the feeling that New Mexico once had a much larger population and a more vibrant economy than it does today. The whole place, with its emptiness and ruined towns, feels like a place that everyone suddenly left. Outside Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the towns along the Rio Grande near ABQ, the whole state is deserted.

 

[Phil_F_NM]

I went to high school in the district that serves Moriarty (along I-40) out to Santa Rosa and almost down to Vaughn. The area that the high school served was huge even though there were less than 1000 students at the time.

It was a bit of a culture shock moving from Fresno, Ca and before that, Colorado Spgs, Co. when I saw that our high school had an agriculture shop in which students could stable their horses for the day. It cost just a little bit but the ag students got horses to tend, the horses got shelter, feed and water, and their owners had guaranteed parking spaces. After school, they'd go home to work on ranches. There was a lot more livestock those days.

That area has seen a lot of build up with the east-mountain area becoming bedroom communities for people in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

Here in and around Philly, it's impossible to even find a dirt road. Maybe a hundred miles east...
And stars. There's no night sky like that out in eastern New Mexico where the stars are so bright they seem to cast enough light to really see by. I remember hiking and bicycling with friends under the full moon which was so bright seeing at night was easy.

But yeah, a lot of people left. The farmers, the ranchers. There's no water table left for farming like they used to do even 20 years ago.
And the jobs left too...

Phil Forrest

 

[pgeobc]

Knowing the west, that is rather like an oil field tank of some kind, too. Formerly, there were tanks of this kind stuck all around in places where yield was low and it would not have payed to put in a pipeline.

 

[Doug]

Chris, from your shot I get the impression of a parched land.

Looks like the same kind of tank as this one in Arizona...

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Chris, from your shot I get the impression of a parched land.

Looks like the same kind of tank as this one in Arizona...

Arizona looks a little greener! Your tank does look identical, though newer!

 

[robert blu]

Chris says: "The sky seems bigger and bluer in the southwest."
Phil says: "And stars. There's no night sky like that out in eastern New Mexico where the stars are so bright they seem to cast enough light to really see by."

Great. Beautiful. And nice photo Chris, thank.

robert