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Saturday, August 30, 2014

A Rails-to-Trails Hike

Mountain Roses were in flower all along the trail
Dr. K, Becca and I hiked the Grand View Trail this morning, and we didn't run into a soul--on Labor Day Saturday!  Lucky us.  Not so lucky, really.  This morning I noticed that the water in our well storage tank was overflowing.  I quickly switched off the pump.  When we got home we had a surge of dirty water.  I hooked hoses up to the outside spigots and ran water for a few hours to see if it would clear up; it didn't.  Then I opened up the tank to see if there was something wrong with the float switch.  It may have failed.  Fortunately I was able to reach our well guy, and he's dropping by between three and four this afternoon to look things over.  We'll see what kind of luck we have from here on out.


This looks like a type of Poppy


The happy hiker

Into the Tularosa Basin

The old railroad bed, now part of the trail

The gravel on the railroad bed almost looks like pumice stone

So I went crazy photographing the wild roses

3 comments:

Dr. K said...

Because of the rains the wildflowers are profuse and beautiful.

Scott said...

I hope things worked out with the well guy (on a holiday weekend, no less!). Though I don't like the idea of having to pay into the communal water system at our place in Colorado, I also didn't relish the idea of having to deal with a well (like some of the folks in the area have to do). Even though we don't live there yet, Kali and I are obligated to pay the yearly water system upkeep fee, which is about $300, because we're homeowners.

packrat said...

I hear you, Scott. We've owned the High Rolls place for almost five years, and we've had a few serious problems with the well, including the replacement of the pump because it froze during the "big freeze" of several Februaries ago.

I've talked several times already to our well guy about what it would take to install a rainwater harvesting system. I like the idea for several reasons: we could stop dealing with well problems (including failure of mechanical parts) and we could revel in our "greeness" since we live in a "critical water" area.

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