Hello from New Mexico. We arrived here the end of October ready to go to work, and work we have. We decided to come back to Elephant Butte State Park because they spoiled us. We love the area, the other volunteers, and the park staff. When we arrived everyone welcomed us back home....and it does feel like home. We were put on the schedule right away because the learning curve was not very high (for Holly, me that's a different story). It turns out that they have been a little short of help for awhile and one host couple had to leave for medical reasons, so we have been working extra at the visitor center.
We are back in Quail Run which is one of three camp areas in the park and we have our same spot back. We have the quail and the cottontail bunnies and jackrabbits back during the days and we get serenaded by the coyotes at night. We had heard that the water level of the lake was down but we were really surprised at how low the lake was.
As you can see from these pictures, the lake is really down this year....about 14 feet from last year. You can see by the dates on the pictures that they are almost a year apart. They have closed three of the boat launch ramps and one of the marinas on the lake. The boating officers are out moving buoys that mark shallow areas almost every day. I have heard that the lake is at only 6 percent of it's capacity. But looking on the bright side, we have a lot of beach. The marinas are floating which is a good thing. They are able to move them to keep them in the deeper areas so they can stay open.
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We took a couple of days over Thanksgiving and went to Ruidoso which is in the middle of the state east of us. Brutus thought it was a great idea because he had his own bed. Ruidoso is a tourist town and in the winter there are several ski areas there. We did go to the Inn of The Mountain Gods for Thanksgiving dinner and had some good food but like I said on facebook, not as good as home made but better then a "Hungry Man Turkey Dinner" in the microwave. After dinner we went to the casino for a little entertainment.
We said the reason we did not want to return to places we have already volunteered at is because we have already seen every thing and we have found that to be true. We have a few things we want to do but we have been almost everywhere in this area . We did go to Silver City to do a little Christmas shopping and stopped to look at a open pit copper mine that we have driven by several times.
It is a very large mine and has been in existence since the 1800's. The area that they are mining cannot be seen from the observation area but you do get to see the full size Tonka trucks.
Well as I said, we have not been running around much, just spending time around the park, going to Sparky's for green chile cheese burgers and relaxing. We do have the Luminary Walk coming up on December 8 so we have been folding 4000 bags for that, but more on that next month.
We did take a little walk on the beach this last day of November. The high for the day was 75 and was 63 when we took the boys down to the beach. The nights are cool but the days are sunny and warm. Nice to be "home". See you all next month.
