My Page: Andrew Stiny
New West Feature
‘Wacky’ New Mexico Town Still Waiting to Offer Space Flights to Tourists. But They’re Coming.
Two women chatted recently—yoga mats tucked under their arms—outside Rhonda Brittan’s Black Cat Books & Coffee in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
This town along the muddy Rio Grande, long known for its therapeutic mineral springs, revels in its image as an anachronistic byway where new age now melds with the old. And befitting a town which rolled the dice in 1950 and changed its name from Hot Springs to Truth or Consequences—fulfilling a challenge from the TV quiz show of the same name—the dice are now being rolled here again. At stake are the future economic successes of the town and state.
Spaceport America, a $209 million taxpayer-funded project enthusiastically backed by former Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration, is expected to launch spaceships in 2013 for private citizens to take sub-orbital trips, with a ticket to ride going for $200,000 per passenger.
“I think it’s a great fit for Truth or Consequences. It’s wacky. What a weird thing it is, like having Disneyland all of a sudden crop up in your neighborhood, so we will see what happens,” said Brittan, as she poured coffee and chatted with customers.
[more]New West Feature
Plastering An Ancient New Mexico Church
Clad in overalls, Albert Struck smoothes a trowelful of fresh adobe mud on a courtyard wall of the San Francisco de Asis Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. At 56, it’s a ritual he has re-enacted year after year.
It is already starting to warm up at 8:30 a.m. but dozens of parishioners and volunteers are shoveling sand, mixing mud and slapping it on ancient thick walls of the venerable church here in the Ranchos de Taos Plaza.
If it’s June it must be the annual “en jarre,” or plastering of the church, which takes place in the first two full weeks of the month.
Struck said the annual mudding is a balm to him personally, and for parishioners it connects them like the straw that binds the adobe.
“When I wake up in the morning I have aches and pains but in the day (when he is mudding) you don’t feel any pain,” said Struck.
The “old ways work the best,” said Gabriel Romero, president of the church council and the project manager for the en jarre.
[more]New West Feature
Harnessing the Sun at a New Mexico Brownfield
The brownfield that is a former tailings dump in Questa, N.M., about 20 miles north of Taos, is unlike other contaminated mine sites. This one gets direct sun about 300 days out of the year, which made it an ideal spot to install one of the largest arrays of concentrated photovoltaic solar panels in the country.
Last month, Chevron Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., turned on 173 advanced solar trackers, each of them 18-by-21 feet in diameter, in the shadow of the Carson National Forest. These are not the panels your average green-minded homeowner installs.
Concentrated photo voltaics, or CPV, have double the conversion efficiency of traditional solar panels. They have an unmatched ability to constantly track the sun, adjusting to absorb a maximum amount of its rays, said Jerry Lomax, vice president of emerging energy for Chevron Technology.
With the project in Quest, “we are investing in new, renewable emerging technologies,” said Lomax.
[more]New West Feature
Will Rockhound State Park Officials Curtail Rock Collecting?
We’ve all heard the wildness ethic mantra: “Take only pictures and leave only footprints.”
But that axiom only went so far recently when the New Mexico State Parks Department floated a trial balloon in a draft plan to curtail or possibly even eliminate rock collecting at Rockhound State Park in far southern New Mexico near Deming.
The 249-acre park, as its name implies, was founded under the rock-collecting concept, an activity allowed in only one other state park in the U.S.
Some locals of this retirement community and annual “snowbird” visitors didn’t think the idea rocked when they read the draft plan.
[more]New West Feature
How a New Mexico Find Revolutionized Archaeology
Although little visited, it was near this town in a valley of pine-covered volcanic buttes near the border of New Mexico and Colorado, that sensational discoveries were made in the last century. They proved ancient man lived and hunted here long before previously thought.
The existence of Folsom Man and the projectile points he used to down massive, now-extinct creatures was revealed here in 1926-27, after the bones were found in 1908. Thompson was opening the Folsom Museum on a Saturday to show me how it happened.
Until those years, the theory held by influential archeologists at the Smithsonian Institute was that native people had only been in North America for about 4,000 years, said Steve Holen, curator of archeology for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
[more]
