Bill's Aviation Log

There isn't much to the river here, but it has carved out an impressive canyon over the years. Here we are looking south.

The highlight of Taos for me was the Kit Carson House and Museum. The famous Kit Carson called this very building home for 25 years. After we watched an excellent film, the museum director basically gave us a personal guided tour of the museum; I enjoyed talking with him about Kit Carson and that era.

Kit Carson was one of the true greats of the American West in the 19th century. He was a mountain man, fur trapper, wilderness guide, tracker, Indian agent, and U.S. Army officer. Incredibly good at it. He knew everybody who was anybody in that age personally: Jim Bridger, John Fremont, William Tecumseh Sherman, General Kearney, President Polk, just to mention a few. He learned Spanish as a teenager, French as a trapper, and he spoke at least six Indian languages, as well as the signlanguage used among Western tribes. Yet he remained illiterate throughout his life and could only write his name.

For a great read about Kit Carson, read Hampton Sides's book: Blood and Thunder.

Carson was a mountain man throughout the west in his twenties and early thirties (1829-42). He must have seen the massive buffalo herds in the Great Plains at their peak.

November 4, 2020 - Taos, New Mexico
I've been interested in visiting Taos ever since a friend a work told me how much he liked it. I pictured this upscale town in the mountains, with lots of nightlife, craft breweries and art galleries. In reality, Taos sits on the high desert at the west edge of the mountains and was run-down and shabby. There were a few art galleries and shops in the plaza but nothing to get excited about. Restaurants were few. For some reason we did not go see the Taos Pueblo; I do regret not seeing that. Other than that, unlike many of the places we have visited, this is one place I have no desire to go back to. Maybe my friend was talking about Taos Ski Valley which is ten miles to the north. We started our Taos sightseeing by driving out to see the nearby Rio Grande Gorge bridge, ten miles northwest of Taos, and ranked the #1 thing to do in Taos on TripAdvisor (which gives you some idea on how much there is to do in Taos; i.e., not much). Yes, this is the same Rio Grande River that flows down to the Gulf of Mexico and forms a good part of the U.S./Mexican border. The bridge was opened in 1965.

There isn't much to the river here, but it has carved out an impressive canyon over the years. Here we are looking south.

Map of the Rio Grande River.

Taos does have its own good-sized airport, which we passed on the way to and from the bridge. This rough, sage-strewn, high desert area west of Taos is known as the Mesa which has a free-spirited community where people live off the grid, often without plumbing and electricity. It is considered a mecca of sorts for those seeking independent, alternative and often anti-government lifestyles. Looking north up the Rio Grande.

Then we walked around Taos Plaza in the historic district. There wasn't much to it. Of course, this is the off-season, and also, New Mexico was the most Covid-tight states we passed through -- you were required to wear a mask outside or be subject to a fine. (I don't know if this is being enforced or not. I doubt it.)

A few tourist shops, artist studios, restaurants and coffee shops. Not much to it.

The highlight of Taos for me was the Kit Carson House and Museum. The famous Kit Carson called this very building home for 25 years. After we watched an excellent film, the museum director basically gave us a personal guided tour of the museum; I enjoyed talking with him about Kit Carson and that era. Kit Carson was one of the true greats of the American West in the 19th century. He was a mountain man, fur trapper, wilderness guide, tracker, Indian agent, and U.S. Army officer. Incredibly good at it. He knew everybody who was anybody in that age personally: Jim Bridger, John Fremont, William Tecumseh Sherman, General Kearney, President Polk, just to mention a few. He learned Spanish as a teenager, French as a trapper, and he spoke at least six Indian languages, as well as the signlanguage used among Western tribes. Yet he remained illiterate throughout his life and could only write his name. For a great read about Kit Carson, read Hampton Sides's book: Blood and Thunder.

The courtyard, which was an integral part of the home. Life then was lived mostly outdoors, and the courtyard would have been the site of many activities: socializing, laundry, cooking, etc.

Carson was a mountain man throughout the west in his twenties and early thirties (1829-42). He must have seen the massive buffalo herds in the Great Plains at their peak.

Of course, these days any historical figure is controversial and Carson is no exception. In 1968, biographer Harvey Carter stated: “In respect to his actual exploits and his actual character, however, Carson was not overrated. If history has to single out one person from among the Mountain Men to receive the admiration of later generations, Carson is the best choice. He had far more of the good qualities and fewer of the bad qualities than anyone else in that varied lot of individuals.”; In 2000, David Roberts wrote, "Carson's trajectory, over three and a half decades, from thoughtless killer of Apaches and Blackfeet to defender and champion of the Utes, marks him out as one of the few frontiersmen whose change of heart toward the Indians, born not of missionary theory but of first hand experience, can serve as an exemplar for the more enlightened policies that sporadically gained the day in the twentieth century."; In 2006, Hampton Sides said that Carson believed the Native Americans needed reservations as a way of physically separating and shielding them from white hostility and white culture. He is said to have viewed the raids on white settlements as driven by desperation, "committed from absolute necessity when in a starving condition." Indian hunting grounds were disappearing as waves of white settlers filled the region. A review in 2020 by a Taos columnist chronicled the attempts in Taos to rename Kit Carson park which failed, in part, because of the large Hispanic population that disagreed with the attack on its one-time community member, that the Taos Pueblo peoples that survived years of attack by Navajo did not see the story of the Navajo wars in the same light as the Carson detractors, and a community of historians who argue that Kit Carson was hardly a "genocidal killer of Indians." A couple of portraits of Kit Carson in his later years.

The house as it looked in 1863. Carson purchased the house as a wedding present for his wife Josefa in 1843 and they lived here until 1867. Josefa died in 1868 after giving birth to their nineth child. Carson himself died a month later, at the age of 59.

The one-story house is in the Spanish Colonial style with adobe walls 14 inches thick, dirt floors and dirt roof. There were only three rooms in the original house. One of the rooms was this kitchen. Each room had a fireplace for heat as it gets pretty cold in Taos -- elevation 6,969 feet -- in the winter.



Below are guns of the type used by Kit Carson during his life. Fourth from top is a replica made by the Museum Director himself of the Hawken Rifle, a muzzle-loading rifle built by the Hawken brothers used on the prairies and in the Rocky Mountains during the early frontier days. It has become synonymous with the "plains rifle", the buffalo gun, and the fur trapper's gun. Developed in the 1820s, it was eventually displaced by breechloaders (such as the Sharps rifle) and lever-action rifles which flourished after the Civil War. One place we didn't go to in Taos but I wish we had was the Taos Pueblo.

Leaving Taos, Lynnette and I drove to Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed and created. It was a pretty drive, about an hour and a half, southwest. It turns out that Los Alamos is located on four mesas of the Pajarito Plateau, as seen below in an aerial photo off Wikipedia.

I hadn't done my homework on Los Alamos very well. They do have a Los Alamos History Museum but it took us awhile to find it and it was closed when we did. It was in a little park so we walked around and looked at a few things like this plaque.

And statues of Oppenheimer and Groves. After Halloween. There is still a big, operational National Laboratory complex in Los Alamos; we drove by it.


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November 4, 2020 - Taos, New Mexico