Sunday Afternoon Post: "Fly Over"

Or even "drive through".  Such is how Oklahoma through Saskatchewan get labelled by people who think there is no life outside of large cities with water or mountain views.  If you focus on the manicured farmland (which does, by the way, feed us) and preconceptions, then sure, it's all a bit like this:

Kansas, heading north on Kansas 177 somewhere between Council Grove and I-70.

I have to admit, the first time I headed west I was intending to zoom through boring old I-80 as fast as possible.  Along the way though, I started wondering just what I was zooming through.  The prairies, it turns out, are not pancake flat for the most part, and were never a uniform sea of grass.  Nebraska features cliffs, forests, and incredible river valleys.  Kansas, seen here, ranges from forests to near desert like conditions in its extreme southwest.  The sound of the wind is incredible, the storms are quite the sight, and the flowers... let's just say try to find a natural "meadow" around where you live and get back to me on how boring grasslands are. 

In our next post, we shall explore misconceptions about location!

GAAHHH! TORNADO!

Two years ago I was passing through Joplin, Missouri.  Only a month had passed since the town was almost entirely destroyed by an F-5 tornado.  Like most people everywhere else, I was nothing but full of sympathy for what had happened to the people there, but like most people, I also let the event slip into the back of my mind as the weeks went on.  I was very sharply reminded about what had happened; most hotels in the area were either closed, packed full of relief workers and displaced locals, or no longer standing.  What had seemed like a convenient stopping place for the night on a long trip from California to Michigan turned into a reminder that we live on a continent that is very, very naturally destructive.  Overhead information signs directed a ton of relief workers into action, with an entire exit off of I-44 dedicated just to outside assistance entering what was left of the city.  I took no pictures of what little could be seen from the interstate, which was horrific.  Trees, buildings, everything... flattened. 

So how does the sort of thing happen, how did people in the past deal with it, what should we do about it, etc?  I figured I would wait to post anything about tornadoes until the media hysteria had died down regarding the recent Oklahoma disasters, but seeing as how I just encountered a weak tornado of my own a few days ago, now seemed to be as good a time as any.  Tornadoes, more than most natural disasters, seem to make people rubber-neck and dive into as much information on the matter as possible.  The press, therefore, jump all over the tragedies involved as fast as they can and a lot of rapid speech and decrying of the fury of nature runs out of the mouths of many a reporter.  For the most part, though, they get their facts straight. 

Tornadoes are the result of colliding air masses within a larger storm system causing a bunch of air to rapidly rotate.  The winds that result within really powerful tornadoes, such as the one which hit Joplin, are among the most powerful winds on our planet, making hurricanes seem mild in comparison.  Hurricanes, in fact, can spawn multiple tornadoes within them, something which happens often in the Carolinas and Georgia when the storms make landfall there.  While one imagines a tornado to suck everything out of existence, its damaging effects are actually the result of the rotating winds knocking around debris which can include entire houses, trees, and trucks.  Nevertheless, as I can confirm from personal experience, one does feel as if one is being sucked off the ground into the blue, or rather gray and lightning illuminated yonder. 

(Before anyone asks, this happened on I-80, at the only tollbooths in Illinois for I-80.  The car I was in was lifted a few feet off the ground before it was thankfully plunked back down just a foot or so in front of where it lifted off.  Yes, I thought I was going to die.  I have also been within a few hundred feet of an F-5 tornado at the corner of where Nebraska and Colorado meet near Ogallala, Nebraska, and more recently a small rope tornado near Whitmore Lake, Michigan.) 

So why do they happen so often here?  You know that bit about air masses doing a dance?  It just so happens that North America is one of the most chaotic battlegrounds for air masses coming in contact with one another.  In the north we have Hudson Bay, which together with our large continental mass (oceans tend to moderate temperatures, dry land tends to let them go nuts in one direction or another) extends cold air masses much closer to the equator than anywhere else on earth.  Frosts have been reported as far south as Tampico, Mexico, clearly in the tropics.  During the last ice age, the frigid Hudson kept pumping out glacial masses of ice that extended closer to the equator than any other non-alpine location on the planet.  In the other corner, the Gulf of Mexico is a heat and humidity factory wherein the great global ocean thermal conveyer belt (say that five times fast) suddenly turns from deep and cold to shallow and hot.  It produces the Gulf Stream which tends to make Europe a pleasant place in terms of temperature moderation.  It also gives the eastern part of our continent our amazing forests and plentiful water.  It also gives us summer days where we can practically watch the paint peel off of the walls because everything is so damn sticky. 

Now, put the two of these together and we get amazing storms.  Make the already very different layers of the atmosphere dance with even greater surface extremes between those larger air masses and we get our destructive tornadoes.  Sure, they get them in Europe now and then, they get them in China (where they have a scaled down version of our hot-cold fight between Siberia and the South China Sea), they get them in the tropics, and they even get them on top of mountains, but nowhere near the intensity and frequency with which they happen in central North America.  Oklahoma is the worst place to be for this sort of thing.  A small part of the state's southeastern corner has a climate and landscape very similar to the rest of the classic "South", complete with palmettos and bald cypresses.  The middle of the state is a rapid transition between forested east and dry open plains, so much so that the space of a few miles can actually turn from big sky country into "hey, where did these trees pop up from?", and that big sky country out west is really dry compared to the eastern side. Winter time can feature decent 50's near Arkansas to sub-zero chills in the panhandle.

Texas panhandle, near the Oklahoma border, US 83 southbound. 

I-44 between near Oklahoma City, not much over 100 miles east and a very different world.

As a result, the winds tend to dance a lot in Oklahoma.  The process does happen just as violently, however, in the rest of the area of the great meeting of air masses.  Though not nearly as frequent, tornadoes are a good possibility during the summer storm system all the way up in Ontario and Pennsylvania.  The Ohio and Tennessee river valleys, full of rolling, wooded landscapes, are hardly what people think of as a prime tornado region, and yet the get tornadoes that can sometimes stay on the ground for well over a hundred miles. 

So good grief, we say, and why do people live there, we ask?  People have lived there for over 10,000 years actually.  The practice of living was a bit different, mind you.  The Pawnees, Osage, and other prairie peoples tended to be a bit more mobile than modern prairie people tend to be.  The main reason for this was a food culture based on the plentiful game of the prairies and one in which the drier region could not necessarily be counted on to offer the same bounty as the corn and squash fields back east could.  Even in the lush climate times of the middle ages, when peoples in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southern Great Lakes were building sizable cities with elaborate earth works and farming quite a bit, the plains peoples kept on following the buffalo.  Why?  Probably because a giant hand would come out of the sky and flatten everything in sight.  The Lakota, who originally hailed from Minnesota and northwestern Ontario, abandoned their more permanent settlements when they got chased onto the plains hundreds of years ago by the Ojibwe.  This didn't last forever, of course.  The second born came from the east and started planting permanent settlements.  I often wonder if the first Euro-Americans would have stayed had there been F-5 tornadoes in Jamestown or Quebec...

Initially settlers built half-buried, sod topped houses.  They were easier to make without having to haul in wood from the east, tended to be cooler, and in some cases even afforded a little bit more protection from the violent storms of the great big open sky.  The early prairie pioneers were a tough sort of folk, and many would-be Kansans and Nebraskans turned away screaming when they had to deal with the rugged life on the plains.  Some went back east, many just passed through to places with more promise like California.  Eventually, however (this is the WHY do people live there now bit), improved plows made farming a simpler affair, the legendary tough tallgrass sod being broken by the steel hand of Mr. John Deere.  Free land through the homestead act made the region increasingly attractive, and, well, money talks.  There are cities there now, rather large ones, and economic opportunities keep calling people away from the unemployment of the rust belt. That aside, the area is incredibly beautiful.  Long, open sightlines and a grand drama of the sky, which as you can see in the Texas picture above, is often far more inviting than it is discouraging. 

People tended to bring with them the comforts of home when the wild west became a bit less wild.  Wood frame houses sprang up, and planted trees made little towns feel more like the beloved Virginia or New York that had been left behind.  Yes, storms and drought came along to spook people, but many stayed and some even returned when they became complacent and forgetful.  Like I noted, it took less than a month for Joplin to sit in the back of my mind.  I dare say that is pretty average for people who don't get affected by tornadoes, and I have actually been intimate with three.  Besides, some towns have been around for quite some time and managed to either survive or not see large scale destruction.

Elk City, Oklahoma, main street.  Many of these buildings are from the early twentieth century and look like they have made it OK.

 People recover.  People rebuild.  Plains people and (true) Midwesterners are built from tough stock, so the saying goes.  What can we do about them, or better put, what we can we do in such regions to better handle the big wind?  As any southern Floridian can tell you, wood does not cut it in the face of powerful forces.  While Miami is turning just as wood frame and vinyl sided as the rest of the country, the historical trend for building to resist hurricanes down there was concrete construction.  Sure, an F5 is an F5, but concrete can handle way more than fragile wood can.  In the meantime, donate to the Red Cross to help those who got a pretty potent reminder that we are not always in charge of the world around us.  Better yet, donate in a month's time when the need will still be great and the money flood will slow to a trickle because we all forget about what happened. 

And again, yes, tornadoes are terrifying to be in, and yet also strangely beautiful.  That's how I feel about them anyway.

Yes, There are Trees in Kansas and Nebraska

People sometimes ask how anyone can stomach driving across the plains through boring "fly-over" states such as Kansas or Nebraska.  They envision long, straight, flat stretches of land with nothing but corn extending into the horizon, perhaps at sometime replaced by open grass range.  While I could humorously make the claim that they are missing the forest for the trees and ignoring the majesty of the open grasslands and incredibly huge sky, such places are often better defended by stating that trees actually do exist in nearly all of non-tundra North America.  No, they might not be towering cathedral pillars as they can get to be in the northwestern or eastern forests, but they are hardly shrubs either.
 

This and below were taken at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Council Grove, Kansas.

Each of the plains states and provinces, in fact, have arboreal symbols, some of which tend to surprise people.  Oklahoma's state tree is the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis), while chilly, open North Dakota's is the American Elm (Ulmus Americana), a tree of great size and commonly a beloved landscape plant throughout eastern North America.  Kansas and Nebraska offer the more common Eastern Cottonwood (Populus Deltoides) which can be found anywhere on the Great Plains that enough water has been provided for the plant to get its start.  Many historic routes and modern highways, in fact, are never far from the reassuring marching line of cottonwoods rising above the grasses and willows as signs of readily available water running along with them.

While the Trans-Canada highway, I-90, 70, and 40 make a clear shot across the grasslands, I-80 stays with the cottonwoods in much of Nebraska as it strikes west along the Platte River.  (See: "Green Is My Platte Valley").  Most towns spring up on the horizon with more trees than buildings in site, even on the high plains.  The truth is that there is enough groundwater and precipitation here that a planted tree can thrive quite well.  Nebraska, in fact, has quite national forests enough to green up the map as much as the eastern states can get painted over.  Grasses are the reason such trees can usually thrive in the first place, their roots being excellent retention agents for water and responsible for making the soil of the plains so workable to begin with.

While the trees do diminish naturally the farther west one goes, to the point of almost negligible forest cover in the rain-shadow of the Rockies, river courses and even slight sharp rises (such as bluffs) will feature some sort of tree cover.  In something of a parley of the trees, east and west invisibly meet in this great division point of North American botany.  Cottonwoods, willows, elms, and cedars follow river courses while they are seemingly watched by western pines and junipers atop river bluffs.

The Wonderfully Lonely Land of High Plains Wyoming

There are many seemingly desolate stretches of land in western North America, but a few forlorn locations actually make these seem to be lush and abuzz with activity.  So it is for southeastern Wyoming, an area that boasts an urban corridor not far to the south (Denver-Fort Collins) and a city of its own, Cheyenne, and yet remains as open and unbroken as in the days when it was resided in by the Lakota and Cheyenne peoples.  Little remains of their world outside of the reservations, and truck stops and hydro towers have since reminded travelers that even here in the open, the modern world is not far away.  Then again, sometimes that old world does make an appearance.

I-25 northbound looking east, barely into the state of Wyoming.  An interstate, fences, and transmission lines working together could not diminish the glory of this moment and landscape.

Now understand something: I have been across the continent many, many times.  Not once until and since this time have I seen a buffalo (Bison Bison).  There it was, though, grazing on the High Plains, surrounded by signs of modernity, and yet it still managed to make the location look wild and free.  In a few miles, I-25 would head through all four and a half miles of Cheyenne, but then almost immediately, the plains would open back up and a herd would come to watch the few passing cars.

I-25 northbound looking east, about 20 miles north of Cheyenne.  

The proghorn (Antilocapra Americana) fared far better than the buffalo did, and these days there are many herds of them in Wyoming.  They congregate here perhaps because the land is a bit less fenced in.  While I did notice a little bit of barbed wire here and there, the land generally still felt wild and free.  I suppose that if anyone wants to get a feel for what the High Plains were once like, they would do well to visit eastern Wyoming.  Such a trip would be good not only to experience the essence of the shortgrass prairies, but also helpful in debunking any myths about the land being a flat barren country.  

I-25 northbound, 25 miles north of Cheyenne, looking towards Laramie Peak, which rises 5,000 feet over the surrounding shortgrass prairie, topping off at an altitude of 10,200 feet.  The peak is 40 miles distant from this point.

The land is anything but either.  It is dotted in bluffs, buttes, cliffs, rolling hills, and covered in lush grasses, cacti, yuccas, and the odd pine and juniper that descends and survives from higher ground. 

I-25 northbound looking east, somewhere between Glendo and Douglas, Wyoming.

Still, the sky is bigger than the earth, the vistas seem to go on forever, and the land is an excellent place to forget about a lot of things and clear out the head.   Like northeastern New Mexico, it is a meeting place of grasslands, mountains, and high deserts, but the atmosphere here is different.  There are no large cholla cacti or Pueblo ruins, and there are no remains of a Spanish culture in this land that was far enough away to escape the dreams of empire.  The Canadiens did make their way through here, but as was the case elsewhere, they left little to memorialize their passing.  The snow stays on the ground here until well until May in some years.  Like eastern Colorado, the land here is where the east and west part their separate ways botanically, but this part of Wyoming lacks the dramatic rise of the Front Range of the Rockies, the great mountains instead having risen into relatively isolated peaks.  Whereas neighboring Colorado is dominated by the mountains which rise on the horizon even over 100 miles away, this is a land where grasslands and Rockies blend more subtly and smoothly, as if both were tranquilized by the serenity of the vast horizons.  

Sunday Afternoon Post: Where the Plains Rise

After a sweaty afternoon of tromping through a tamarack fen to eradicate Glossy Buckthorn (Frangula Alnus), a venture in which I got stuck in the fen muck quite a few times and got swarmed by every kind of insect ever, well... my thoughts turn to someplace much drier and muckless.

7 miles east of Longmont, Colorado.

This would be along US 36 Northbound at, as the title suggests, the diminutive birth of the Rockies as the Plains rise up into something resembling stubby mountains.  It's a pretty dry place, with only some junipers managing to take a lease on life and then only on the places where the slope and a slight rise in elevation both captures more moisture than normal and change the wildfire regime.  The grass cover is deceptive; there are a ton of yuccas, small cacti, and even sagebrush growing in there.

Q and A Session Four

This Q and A session is dedicated to the concept of not taking your backyard for granted.  I was lucky to get three questions that worked well this way.

Q: Why so many posts about prairies and savannas?

A: Grasslands are the most common ecosystem across the entire continent.  They can be found in nearly every state, province, and territory of our three nations, albeit in different forms.  In pre-colonial times, they were far more extensive than in the present day, engaging neighboring ecosystems in a battle royale of wildfires, rains, and herd grazing patterns.  Grasslands are extremely resilient and adaptable ecosystems that define the wild nature of our continent on the whole: a fairly warm, windy place that is full of water and yet also remarkably dry.  They can handle the worst weather we get, including extremes in temperature and precipitation, and manage to survive.  Conversely, they are among the most productive and diverse lands on the entire planet, positively exploding with life and beauty with just a little bit of rain and warmth.  They can be found at the edge of deserts, in meadows high atop mountains, far north in the tundra or far south in the leeward slopes of tropical Mexico, in sandy expanses left behind from the last glaciers melting away over the Canadian Shield, amidst the pines and palmettos of Florida, in patches of "barrens" surrounding the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, in clearings amongst great forests, and of course, in the great central plains that stretch from Alberta to Coahuila.

What's more, in addition to being emblematic of the frontier and survivalist spirit of this continent, they defy simplification, and are often the most misunderstood ecosystems out there.  North American grasslands are often thought of like so:

When in fact they are often wonderful worlds bursting with life like:

In short, they are often far more than meets the eye.  On the whole, nature has so many wonderful surprises awaiting for those willing to take the time and explore it.  Our hectic world these days is so caught up in activity for the sake of self-benefit that we often overlook the concept of self-improvement, and definitely leave wonder and exploration out of the equation.  Quite literally, we cannot see the forest for the trees!  Grasslands are wonderful places where we are forced to pay attention to what is underfoot and seemingly invisible to the glancing eye in order to fully appreciate what they have to show us.  This was certainly true for my development in observing and understand ecosystems.  After I gave the Great Plains a chance, I never looked at a forest the same way again.

Speaking of that, to respond to the question on a more personal level, I had always wondered where the forest stopped and the prairie began.  When I was a kid hungry for travel with that dog-eared and bent atlas in my hands, I always envisioned everything from Regina to Dallas to be one giant flat expanse of lawn.  I could not help but imagine what the line between this lawn and the forest to the east looked like, and I pictured a dark, lush forest somewhere in Missouri that all of a sudden petered out into the endless prairie, a wall of tree meeting a sea of grass.  The search for this grand line of division, though largely dispelled when I started to read about the places in that atlas, has always been a bit in the back of my mind even recently.  Whenever I head out west, when driving through Iowa and Missouri, I always take in the scenery with even more intensity and detailed interest than I do elsewhere ecological transitions, or ecotones, occur, expecting to find that line one day.  I wanted to know where the forest turned into the plains which gave way to the mountains which became the desert which... you get the point.  Ecotones are fascinating worlds of connections between diverse areas, both because of the contrast between life zones they display, and because of the shared features between regions they represent.  This dovetails into the next question:

Q: What are some places you have not yet been to in North America that you would put on your "bucket list"?

A: That would make for a very interesting post, and I say that because there are so many places I would want to see before I give myself back to the soil.  I suppose here I can cheat and qualify that question with a specific direction: what places would I put on my list of places I am most ecologically curious about?  I would say that have to do with transitions, and finding more of my great wall of forests.  Specifically, I would give my right eye to see (or rather have seen) where the boreal forest transitions into the central grasslands.  Picture an arc stretching from Edmonton to Winnipeg and down towards Minneapolis.  The biologist-powers that be call this "Aspen Parkland", where the great forests of spruce, fir, poplars, birches, and pines dance and meet with the prairies.  I have always wondered what an outcropping of Canadian Shield granite looks like emerging from tallgrass.  Yep, I have very simple desires and plans in life, a man who wants to find a rock sticking out of a field.  I imagine very little of this landscape survives intact in the United States, and the best bet would be to find it in Canada in some of the national parks set aside to preserve such a landscape, but the remaining ecotones in Minnesota hold a particular fascination for me because they share many species in common with the lands next door in Michigan and Ontario that I love so much.  Algonquin meets the prairie, I can only imagine it!

I would also love to see the Black Hills, as they are the easternmost extension of the great western mountain forests, one of the few places where elements of eastern, western, and northern forests come together, stuck in the middle of hundreds of miles of the Great Plains.  Again, I like putting the puzzle together as much as seeing the finished map.

On the same general note:

Q: You seem to be passionate about much of the country (I assume this is referring to the United States specifically), finding something nice about everywhere.  Is there any place you could not live?  I mean, could you actually live in a desert or on the plains?

A: Probably somewhere in the Deep South, and not out of a cultural bias that leaves me with a raised eyebrow and open mouth whenever I encounter "rednecks" (but when it comes down to it, I find all sorts of people to be far more interesting than undesirable).  The Deep South is exotically lovely, what with magnolias, live oaks (Quercus Virginiana) and balcypresses (Taxodium Distichum) dripping in Spanish Moss, and palmettos making the most of the steamy landscape.  All the same, it is, well, a steamy landscape.  I don't do heat and humidity in combination very well.  I would imagine parts of Mississippi would be my least desirable place to live, owing to the conditions and the fact that anything resembling a mountain would be at least a half day drive away.  Then again, the flora is lovely, the music is great, and the river and Gulf are never far away.  As for the desert and plains, as per my response to the first question, they are not as desolate and devoid of life as they seem to be.  They also both tend to be close to mountains, so if I wanted to, I could easily get my fill of some pine forest for a bit.  I like both snow and palm trees, so the desert or the southern plains could work nicely, sure.  St. George, Utah comes to mind, as they have both.

Well, actually, this is Washington, Utah, but that is right next door.

It also helps to have friends there.  The western migration trend never really has stopped, it seems.  Anyway, I would probably be most at home in northern Ontario or western Quebec, which would be outside of the United States, but you get the picture.  That would be the heart part of my "home is where the heart is" even if I could adapt to any place fairly well.  Even if circumstances forced me to live in Jackson, Mississippi, I would hardly consider my life shot to hell, but would get a really powerful air conditioner as soon as possible, or at least a nice ceiling fan.  I would explore every nook and cranny of my new home and get to know its flowers, trees, history, and way of naming soft drinks rather well.  The Creator left us a nice world to live in, and the least I can do is come to know and appreciate it.

The Santa Fe Trail: The Start of U.S.-Mexico Relations

The Mexican-American war, while perhaps the most important event in the history of the relationship between Mexico and the United States, was not the first meeting of the two nations.  Rather, through commerce and migration, the countries had a relationship dating back to the early part of the nineteenth century.  Mexico was still a Spanish territory when Americans began showing up in Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, and Veracruz.  The men who came to these places were explorers, merchants, and mercenaries, even some fur traders from distant Canada.  Here and there, business of all sorts happened, at least when the authorities were not around.  The peoples of Mexico were more than happy to engage in commerce with the more friendly and generous faces than those which came from across the ocean.  Time and again, however, the Spanish authorities intervened, and the Americans found themselves arrested or deported, just as Canadians, eager to find more fur-trade opportunities, had been many times before them.

Americans still made their way to Mexico, in greater numbers once the Louisiana Purchase was validated by Spain in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.   Spanish bans on Mexican exports still stood, even if relations between Madrid and Washington were becoming more civil.  Like so many of his contemporaries, William Becknell took a gamble that maybe things were getting peaceable enough that trade might sneak by a bit easier.  In September of 1821, Becknell departed from Missouri and set out across the Great Plains toward the capital of Nuevo Mexico, Santa Fe.   About 40 miles out of Santa Fe, at a place known as San Miguel del Vado, Becknell and his five companions were approached by soldiers.  While no record remains of what took place at this meeting, not too much imagination is needed to envision that it was a cordial affair, because Becknell was informed that Mexico was now free, and that Santa Fe's markets were ready and waiting for commerce with the rest of North America.  When Becknell arrived in the city, crowds gathered and a great celebration began.

He quickly found buyers for his small stock of textiles, and he found goods and silver to bring back with him in exchange.  Mexicans wanted textiles, especially the very desirable cotton, which the United States was starting to produce in abundance.  Americans like Becknell gladly accepted silver pesos for it, but they also brought back draft animals, herbs, spices, exotic jewelry, and an amazing rich of mineral wealth of all kinds.  They also found furs; French and English speaking Canadians alike, usually working for the growing Hudson's Bay Company, were part of a vast network already working the interior of the continent, and well-informed about what was going on to the south.  In many ways, Santa Fe commerce was the start of relations between all three North American nations, and the city was very much an international hub of activity.  In any event, Becknell came back to Missouri with a smile on his face and much-needed silver currency to fill the cash-dry economy there with.  The next year, he loaded covered wagons, the first to cross the plains in fact, and did it all over again.  By 1824, traffic between Santa Fe and Missouri had started to impact the American economy enough to prompt President Monroe to order a survey of prominent trail routes between the lands.

The opening of relations was profitable for both parties, and Mexican traders took to the trail just as often as their American counterparts did.  Commerce often did not stop in Santa Fe, and the wagons went clear from Independence to Chihuahua and points southwards.  Santa Fe, however, was the juncture between the worlds of the United States and Mexico, and the city engaged in so much American trade that eventually most of New Mexico's dealings were with a far closer United States than with seemingly distant Mexico.  This is not to say that Santa Fe or the New Mexicans surrendered their culture and identity in the process.  While the New Mexicans embraced becoming a part of the United States during the Mexican-American war, they also retained their language and unique culture that had developed as a marriage between Native and Hispanic worlds.  To this day, many New Mexicans are completely bi-lingual, and cities like Santa Fe celebrate their heritage even as they are undoubtedly American in loyalty and character.  The area still celebrates the link it serves as between the parts of our continent:

Otherwise known as I-25.

The Santa Fe trail, after all, was about introducing cultures to one another, blazed in the forging of ties between two young republics, an opening of borders to commerce and migration.  The opening of the trail was a tender embrace between America and Mexico, and is all too easily forgotten in the wake of a century and half of mistrust, bigotry, power struggles, politics, and drugs, between the two neighbors.  Memory remains, however, and regardless of where one stands on the issue of relations between our two nations (which have really started to improve, despite what goes around), this world of a bonding between two nations can still be seen in what remains of the trail, especially in New Mexico.  Let's start down in Santa Fe,  then:

This part of New Mexico is the junction of the Rockies, the deserts of the southwest, and the Great Plains.  Not too much of a stretch of imagination is needed to see that this was once a world truly in the middle of the path between east, west, and south.  Everything here is distinctively New Mexican, right down to the bus stops.

Here we have a place that is obviously part of the United States, and yet also would not seem too out of place in Mexico, while not being entirely a product of either place.

They most likely did not know it, but the founders of Santa Fe picked a pretty decent location that would become the meeting place of many other "trails" to come in the future:

Moving out from Santa Fe, the trail, Us 66, and now I-25, skirts the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (part of the Rockies) before spilling out into the Great Plains.  Pictured here is part of Glorietta Pass.

At the entrance to the pass, the trail passes just to the south of the ruins of the Pecos pueblo, preserved at Pecos National Historical Park.  Glorietta Pass, in fact, has served not only as a passage for the trail, but has been walked by Coronado and his conquistadores, fought over in the Civil War, and long served as the meeting place between Pubeloan peoples and the peoples of the plains, such as the Kiowa and Comanche.  Pecos is probably the most diverse point of cultural meeting in all of North America.  We will come see it in a future post.  For now, here is the view from the ruins, looking back west to the pass.

 The trail eases out at an angle into the high plains of northeastern New Mexico, leaving behind the pinyon-juniper forest and entering one of the most arid parts of the Great Plains, a grassland dotted with cholla cacti, sagebrush, and yuccas.  The golden grass waves in an almost ever-present wind that blows between the great air masses of the arctic and the tropics, and between mountains and seemingly endless plains.

Once in the plains, the trail diverges.  One path, historically considered the safest route, follows the base of the Rockies north into Colorado until it cuts across the land to meet the Arkansas river.  This route is largely followed today by I-25.  Some of the best preserved ruts of the trail can be found at one of its famous sites, Fort Union, where the other path of the trail leaves this one.

This other path cuts northeast-southwest across New Mexico, past dead volcanoes and into the panhandle of Oklahoma, which has some of the most open country in the entire world.  The experience is good for making us feel small when we otherwise feel like kings of the earth, to say the least.  We have the luxury of roads to do this on now.  One can only imagine what travelers heading down the trail must have felt when they saw this, at once both in awe and hoping that the ruts they traveled on would stay visible.

This path continues into surprisingly rugged parts of Kansas before meeting the other path again at the Arkansas river, at which point the trails cut clear across the open land towards Independence, Missouri.  Halfway between the river and Missouri, things would get a bit greener and arboreal again, with some trees even growing in the middle of the prairie, sentinels of the advancing edge of the eastern forests.

At Council Grove, the trail is well-defined, and a memorial sits on it to mark the spot where the United States and the Osage nation signed a treaty to protect safe passage across their homeland.  The town was named for both the treaty and the grove of trees that offered shelter to those getting ready to depart into the treeless expanses to the west.  One of the 12 Madonna(s) of the Trail, placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, can be found here.

The trail then arrives at its eastern terminus, Independence, a very different place from Santa Fe.  Here we have the text-book definition of a Midwestern American town, a place that even in the 1820's would have been as much a great discovery for Mexican travelers as Santa Fe was for the Americans and Canadians.  The tour we took from west to east was to highlight the impression this must have made on such travelers, heading from the vast, open, dry, adobe west to the relatively more compact, settled, humid, brick and mortar east.  Just as Santa Fe served as the door to Mexico and the inter-mountain west (including the Old Spanish trail to California, by way of Utah), Independence was the place where the California and Oregon trails would start, as well as points to the east, serving as the western terminus of the National Road, which would take people all the way to the Potomac at Cumberland, Maryland.  Here too, in those days of optimism so long ago, could there be found the various peoples of the continent, trading with one another, exchanging cultures, and getting ready to set off across the land to some destination of promise.  No record remains of any parties thrown when the first Mexicans arrived in Independence, but it was quite likely that the meeting was a good one.