Saturday, October 14, 2017

We have had a lull period.  We moved from Colorado Springs area on Friday to Trinidad, CO.  We are just north of the southern border, going into New Mexico.  We thought this would be a good stopover to check out 'what seemed like an interesting little town' and we came away quite disappointed.  It is a very depressed area, lots of homeless people, or people wanting a handout, the buildings are quite run down, so we are glad we are camped in the Trinidad State park, just west of town.  The only campground we found in our 'Trailer Life' book, didn't look very appealing, so Jim went on Google Earth to check it out.  That confirmed our thoughts.  We opted for the state park, and found it quite nice.  We ventured downtown this morning to get some geo-caching and check out the town.  We got two caches and decided to do the ones that are outside of town.  A geo-cache took us to a small town west of our campground called, Cokedale.  We did find that interesting.

The Corps of Engineers built the dam near the state park, but they don't run the campground.  We can still see the mountains to the west. 

This sign greeted us on the outskirts of the little two street town of Cokedale.  Two surrounding counties in the area generated over 60% of the Colorado coal output in the early 1900's.   Coking coal is a necessary ingredient in smelting and refining iron, since it burns with intense heat.  Making coke from coal removed all moisture and much sulfur and phosphorous.

This is what remains of the row of coke ovens, that they used during the coal smelting period.  They are much different from the coke ovens that we have seen in Florence, AZ, and Death Valley, CA.  They are individual 'beehives', where these seemed joined together like a small strip mall.  They closed the operation in 1947, and the people who were working the mines, wanted to continue living here.  So, the mining company sold them a house for $100.00 per room, and $50.00 per lot.  The Town of Cokedale was incorporated in 1948.  Because we chose not to geo-cache in Trinidad, we were home in time to watch the Badgers pull out a win over Purdue.  Tomorrow we will watch the Packers and there is a nice laundry room in the activity building here in the park.  I'll get my laundry done before we move south to Santa Rosa, NM on Monday.  That will be just a stop over for two nights.  We are prolonging arriving in Alamogordo, NM, as they are experiencing mid-80 degree weather, and we prefer the 70's!  Back to the heat!