BRN 9-4 - Flipbook - Page 3
The Black Range is now home to us.
But gaze eastward on a clear day,
from a perch on Emory Pass or even
while descending the windy road
from Hillsboro to Interstate 25 and
you can see it - the blue silhouette of
the San Andres Mountains. As the
crow ßies, the nearest point of this
range to our home in Kingston is
almost 60 miles away in Hembrillo
Basin. In turn, the Basin is roughly
halfway between the rangeÕs southern
origin at San Augustin Pass and its
northern end at Mockingbird Gap, a
reach of almost 100 miles. It is also
ßanked by two expansive desert
basins: the Jornada del Muerto to the
west, and the Tularosa Basin to the
east. The San Andres Mountains lie
completely within White Sands
Missile Range, so to most people,
they are a mysterious ghost range
inaccessible to anyone not possessing
the security credentials to enter.
Years ago, we had that access.
Because we documented our time
there with photos, we sought this
opportunity to lift the curtain, so to
speak, and let others experience the
grandeur of this landscape.
The San Andres Mountains is 795
square miles of one of the wildest,
most ecologically intact, and largest
expanses of Chihuahuan Desert
mountains in the southwestern United
States. It has always been this way;
except for a relatively brief period of
less than a hundred years, when
ranchers raised cattle, sheep, goats,
and horses in those mountains.
Those inhabitants were driven from
the area after the establishment of
the White Sands Proving Grounds in
1945, which then expanded into
White Sands Missile Range in 1958.
The missile range is an exclusive
federal jurisdiction as a military
installation and is managed by the
United States Army. The U. S. Army
has since protected these
mountains, and this has allowed
natural ecosystem processes to
dominate their character.
Here, we present a way to
experience the San Andres
Mountains in a collection of
photographs that we took during
1985 to 1995. We used 35 mm
format cameras with Kodachrome,
Ektachrome, and Fujichrome slide
Þlm. We have scanned the slides
into digital format for this article.
These mountains were the outdoor
laboratory for our research. We
explored the canyons, ridges, and
slopes of these mountains while
conducting an ecology on the puma,
Puma concolor. The scientiÞc work
on our endeavor is published in a
peer-reviewed book, Desert Puma:
Evolutionary Ecology and
Conservation of an Enduring
Carnivore, (K. A. Logan and L. L.
Sweanor, 2001, Island Press,
2
Washington, D.C.). This presentation,
however, is not about that, but about
those wild desert mountains, through
our photographs and memories.
