Last week my little dog Sparky and I headed out to the High Plaines in the northeast corner of New Mexico to check out some dinosaur tracks and then continue across the border to Oklahoma’s highest point at Bleck Mesa.
The unending grasslands of the High Plaines are both haunting and beautiful at the same time.
This very area (the northeast corner of New Mexico and the western Oklahoma Panhandle) was the epicenter of the “Dust Bowl” in the 1930s. What had been, prior to European settlement, an unending High Plaines of semi-arid grassland best suited for buffalo was turned into farmland when homesteaders poured into the region in the early part of the last century. (This was one of the last areas in the country to be homesteaded.) The new arrivals were certain that “rain would follow the plow” and went ahead to plow up the grassland. Unfortunately, after a few good rain years in the late teens and twenties, the rains stopped and the now plowed-up grassland turned into dust and catastrophic devastation during the 1930s. Continue Reading →
