Google Sightseeing » New Mexico

Vehicular Art

Ian Brown — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:57:18 +0000

While most people dispose of old vehicle by sending them for scrap or recycling, there are endless opportunities to do something more inventive. Today we take a look at large-scale vehicular art around the world, beginning with Florida’s Airstream Ranch.

While it may look as though 8 large trailers have plummeted nose-first from the sky, they were in fact carefully placed by Frank Bates, who happens to own a nearby RV dealership. Google’s 45-degree imagery gives us a great look at the installation from the air.

This blog post has good images and information about the trailers, and the official website has a bunch of links and a documentary video. The neighbours are less than impressed with this apparent advertising ploy, but Bates is insistent that it is a true piece of art¹ inspired by his visit to Cadillac Ranch in Texas

We visited Cadillac Ranch back in the early days of this site. The satellite imagery hasn’t improved, and while there is now a Street View, it’s sadly from the very early low-resolution systems.

We visited Carhenge – another well-known car sculpture – in our Monumental Wannabes post last year. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare apparently it’s now for sale.

We switch modes of transport briefly for a visit to a monument in Santa Rosa, California, that at first glance appears to be a fuzzy obelisk.

Closer observation reveals that it’s actually constructed of bicycle frames – three hundred and forty of them (and one tricycle) according this Wired article. Created by Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector the sculpture is named Cyclisk and stands almost 20m tall.

Google’s newly-released Street View imagery of Belgium allows us to see another bicycle sculpture in the town of Brakel, which is on the route of the Tour of Flanders spring classic race.

Returning to car art, we move to Sydney, Australia, where a large rock appears to have played a key role in a terrible accident involving a red Ford Festiva.

This is actually a sculpture named Still Life With Stone and Car, by artist Jimmie Durham, and it was created through the relatively simple process of, um… dropping a large rock on a car.

Originally placed near the Opera House, the sculpture was later moved to its current location where a pair of signs help dissuade any unknowing passers-by from calling the police to report the accident.

Sadly, this kind of cruel vehicular torture isn’t isolated – in 2009 we visited two places where cars have been impaled in the name of art.

In Toronto this car appears to have been abandoned for so long that it has been reclaimed by nature.

Commonly known as The Garden Car, it is more officially called the Community Vehicular Reclamation Project. More details can be found in this blog post.

Perhaps the most bizarre vehicular artwork can be found in rural Vermont, in the form of a large concrete gorilla holding aloft a Volkswagen Beetle.

The story behind its creation can be found at Roadside America.

To wrap up, a few artworks about which I haven’t been able to find much information. First, another Airstream trailer which has been converted into a spaceship in a park in Sacramento, California.

In Albuquerque an old Chevrolet has been tiled for some reason, and mounted on top of an arch.

And finally, in Geldrop, the Netherlands, a tiny old Fiat 500 has been bronzed and topped with a statue of a girl – the work of artist Carla Rump.

If you know of any other vehicular art, please post it in the comments. I’d particularly be interested to know if anyone from Stockholm knows if this bus-made-of-cars is visible on satellite or Street View. I really wanted to include it in this post but couldn’t find a precise location for it.

In 2010 a judge ruled that it did in fact qualify as a work of art. ↩

Locations: Australia, Belgium, California, Florida, Netherlands, New Mexico, Ontario, Texas, Vermont / Categories: Other Vehicles, Street Views, Structures, Weirdness

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White Sands National Monument (Desert Week 2011)

Ian Brown — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:03:42 +0000

We paid a brief visit to White Sands National Monument five years ago, but with newer imagery now available, this year’s Desert Week seems like a great excuse for a return visit to this absolutely fascinating field of white sand dunes, that also happens to be where the first atom bomb was detonated.

Unlike the silica-based sand that is typically the focus of Desert Week, the stunning white dunes here are the result of a rare accumulation of gypsum crystals. While this soft mineral typically dissolves in water, this unique basin valley features an ancient deposit of crystals left behind by a huge lake during the last ice age, in an area known as the Alkali Flat. (The X shape visible in this image is explained below.)

As the valley is surrounded by mountains, there is no way for water to flow to the sea, meaning that minerals are deposited on the ground, particularly in low-lying areas such as Lake Lucero, which is only filled with water after heavy rain.

Evaporation forms large crystals along the shores of the lake and over time erosion reduces them to small granules which are blown by the prevailing south-westerly winds to form dunes, of which there are several types.

Parabolic dunes (U shapes facing upwind) are found behind the dune front, while barchan dunes (U shapes facing downwind) dominate the centre of the field.

Highway 70 skirts the eastern edge of the park, so Street View allows us to see the dune front where dunes are interspersed with vegetation. We can even see the sand spilling onto the edge of the road!

There’s a visitor centre off the highway, from where you can take a scenic drive or walk through the dunes. You can also get a good view of the park from roads in the nearby mountains, with the gleaming white sands standing in stark contrast to the surrounding landscape which leads to the San Andres mountains in the distance.

For a protected National Monument¹, there is a huge amount of military development here, with the White Sands Missile Range occupying land both within the park and just outside its northern and southern boundaries.

Inside the park, on the Alkali Flat, is the White Sands Space Harbor – a training site for Space Shuttle pilots. A pair of 10km long runways (the X in an earlier image) can act as emergency landing sites should the Shuttle’s usual landing locations be unavailable. The point where the runways cross, and the markings at the end of each runway, are clearly visible. Presumably it must be a constant challenge to keep the runways clear of the shifting sands.

The Space Harbor is part of the larger White Sands Test Facility, a NASA program with a wide range of capabilities such as altitude simulation and propulsion testing. A number of locations are visible, including a row of H-shaped markings, the purpose of which isn’t clear.

To the south of the park, the White Sands Missile Range has a large facility accessed via a gatehouse off the highway. There are markings all around the area which are likely the result of missile tests.

The northern part of the missile range extends a considerable distance and includes the Trinity test site, where the first ever atom bomb was detonated. We mentioned the test site in our original post, but the quality of Google’s images has improved considerably since then!

One additional military installation can be found to the east of the park – the Holloman Air Force Base and High Speed Test Track which we also visited a couple of years ago.

You can learn more about White Sands National Monument at Wikipedia and the park’s official site.

A National Monument is similar in status to a National Park, but can be defined by the US President without Congressional approval. While the landscape is safeguarded, wildlife in National Monuments is less protected than in a National Park. ↩

Locations: New Mexico / Categories: Deserts, Monuments, Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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Capulin Volcano National Monument (Volcano Week 5)

Matt Bucher — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:24:55 +0000

The solitary road that leads to the top of Capulin Volcano National Monument in northeast New Mexico curves gracefully around to the top of the crater.

Capulin Volcano is an almost-perfect cone-shaped inactive volcano that rises more than 300 metres from the surrounding plains.

“Capulín” is the Spanish name for chokecherry, a type of tree native to North America. Just four years after New Mexico became a state (1912), Capulin Volcano was made a National Monument (1916) by President Wilson.

Here’s a view of the volcano from the nearby US Route 87. You’ll notice that Route 87 connects I-25 near Raton, NM and I-40 near Amarillo, TX. This makes it a common route for those traveling between Texas and Colorado, often to go skiing. The long stretch of highway between Amarillo and Raton Pass can feel especially lonesome, and Capulin Volcano is the only National Monument — and one of the only highlights for tourists — along that route.¹

Since it hasn’t erupted in at least 58,000 years, it might be easy to mistake Capulin for a hill or a small mountain. In fact, until the 1980s, it was called Capulin Mountain.

The route up to the volcano is not stunning, and its conical shape is hard to see up close. This creates a sort of optical illusion that makes the volcano look smaller than it really is.

However, an aerial view, or a view from the pinnacle shows how dramatically the cone rises above the surrounding landscape. Some visitors claim it’s possible to see parts of five states (New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas) from the highest point, but the flat landscape makes it hard to differentiate where state boundaries begin and end.

On one such trip, when I was eight years old, my family and I were traveling from Texas to Colorado to visit some of our friends. It was Christmastime, and for some reason we found ourselves on Christmas Eve morning driving across the Panhandle of Texas and that little triangular corner-slice of New Mexico anchored by Raton. The plains stretch for miles there; on a clear day, when you come up on a small rise in the road, in the bright, cloudless sky, it’s possible to see twenty miles or more. We had a brown Volkswagen Rabbit hatchback and three small children bedded down in the area created by folding down the back two seats. We spread blankets across the back and spent the whole trip sleeping or on our knees looking out the hatchback window at the empty, colourless landscape. For reasons that still seem unclear, my parents decided this morning would be a good time to finally drive to the top of that inactive volcano off in the distance. We passed no cars on the approaching road; the ranger station was abandoned. There were no other cars in the parking lot at the top of the rim. It was cold and the only thing to do was to get out of the car and run around for a few minutes (a necessity on a long road trip with small children). However, when we got back in the car, the little Volkswagen refused to start. A couple of minutes of fiddling under the hood quickly degenerated into sheer terror. I had never seen my father so enraged. We were alone at the top of an isolated volcano on Christmas Eve. We could see five U.S. states and not another human being. My father slowly realised that he would have to walk down the length of the volcano and try to flag down another car on the approaching road. Had we even seen a service station in the past hour or two of driving? No one could remember. As my father set off on foot, my mother was able to keep the three of us kids entertained in that small hatchback until help arrived a couple of hours later. Somehow we made it to Colorado, but not before we were almost swallowed by the terrible solitude of this inactive volcano. ↩

Locations: New Mexico / Categories: Natural Landmarks, Street Views, Volcanoes

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Shiprocked on the Highway to Hell (Desert Week 2)

Evan Brammer — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:35:16 +0000

Welcome to the second annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week!

It appears that snow has fallen in hell! At least it has along “The Devil’s Highway“. Let’s take a drive down former US Route 666 to see what kind of trouble we can get into.

Beginning in the mile high state of Colorado and running south through the Sonoran desert, the demonically-named road ends in Douglas, Arizona along the Mexican border.

This highway was of course named for bearing the Number of the Beast, but a high number of vehicular fatalities attached a stigma to the road that persists, despite it having been renamed in 2003. This may have been due in part to a serious bout of “chronic sign theft“.

Theft along the Devil’s Highway you say? To be expected for sure!

There’s definitely some sort of dark magic happening on the highway, as you can see in this aerial shot south of Gallup, New Mexico, where the road has been sliced into two parts, which run alongside but never into each other¹!

While the route number and nickname draw many tourists on their own, many often stop by to see another spectacular sight, the Shiprock rock formation (Wikipedia). It’s close enough to the road that even the Street View car got a good look!

“The day it snows in hell” appears to have arrived in this shot as well, as there is clearly snow on the ground right in the middle of America’s hottest desert.

Like Route 666, the Sonoran desert stretches from the Mexican border to Colorado; covering an impressive 311,000 square km. It’s home to dozens of mammal, fish and amphibian species, hundreds of bird species, and thousands of native bee and plant species; as well as America’s only population of Jaguars!

It is also the only place in the world the famous saguaro cactus grows, despite being an international symbol for deserts.²

Route 666 and the Sonoran desert are in an area of extremes. In the day the sun scorches down on all weary travellers. At night the heat dissipates to the point that there is often snow on the ground by morning. You fall asleep sweating, you wake up freezing.

So consider yourself warned. The desert is is desolate, rugged, and rough. But come on! If you’re going to travel the Devil’s Highway, you going to face some evils, right?

Most likely an image stitching issue with Google. ↩
For the life of me I could not find a streetview image anywhere of a saguaro cactus. If you find one, post a link in the comments and I’ll update the post. ↩

Locations: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah / Categories: Deserts, Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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Holloman High Speed Test Track

Ian Brown — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:37:32 +0000

Time for a break from the World’s Largest trivia, lets take a look at the World’s Fastest … the location of the land speed record¹ is the Holloman High Speed Test Track in New Mexico.

South End:

North End:

The track stretches for almost 16km across the desert – you have to zoom out a long way to see the whole thing!

It is used by the Holloman Air Force Base to test new vehicle, munitions and missile technologies by propelling rocket-powered sleds at ever-increasing velocities. The current speed record, set in 2008, is 10,604km/hour – that’s Mach 9 or about 3km per second!

From a standing start, the sled with multiple-stage rockets travelled 6km of the track in just six seconds! The track was enclosed in a helium-filled tent to reduce drag, but this YouTube video gives a pretty good idea of how awesome it must have been to witness!

There’s not much to see along the track on the Google Maps view, other than a slight image overlap problem, but Live Maps does show some kind of vehicle on one part of the track.

It’s worth reading the before and after of the record attempt, and some of these pictures of previous tests are fascinating.

Thanks to Ryan C.

Specifically, the land speed record for railed vehicles – rocket sled category, which is several times faster than any other land-based vehicles. ↩

Locations: New Mexico / Categories: Other Vehicles

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The Very Large Array

Ian Brown — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:50:50 +0000

Sprawled across the Plains of San Augustin in New Mexico is the Very Large Array – a Y-shaped radio astronomy observatory made up of 27 independent dish antennas.

The scale of the VLA operation is quite remarkable- each dish is 25m across and weighs 209 tonnes. They travel on train tracks which make up each of the three 21km arms of the array. A specially designed locomotive maneuvers the antennas into different configurations for specific observations.

The 27 antennas effectively provide the imaging capability of an antenna 36km wide, with the sensitivity of a dish 130m across. This allows the study of the sun, planets, black holes, pulsars, quasars and myriad other astronomical objects.

Construction was started in 1973 and completed – $78.5million later – in 1980. Currently, new hardware is being installed to improve the capabilites of the observatory – making it the Expanded Very Large Array, and funding is sought to add further dishes across the state to expand the system even further.

The VLA has featured in several movies including Contact, Independence Day and 2010: Odyssey Two.

It was apparently a location of interest for the driver of the Street View Car. Not content to pass by on Highway 60, which crosses the tracks, but without a good view of any dishes …

… a detour was taken down Old Highway 60, past a great view of many dishes, to the point where it reaches the tracks directly beneath one of the dishes.

Google Sightseeing has covered all sorts of telescopes in the past, some of which have received great image updates since they were first posted.

Thanks to the many readers who suggested this one: james v, Stilt, Tim, Matt, Jonathan Hoppe, Benjamin, Benjamin, Doug Hershberger, Jarrod Lombardo, Leandro Garcia, Glenn, Trevor, Derek and Yablo.

Locations: New Mexico / Categories: Movie Locations, Street Views, Structures

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Hitchhiker’s Guide to Street View

James Turnbull — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:37:14 +0000

U.S Route 64 is a mostly-unexciting 2,326 mile-long highway that we join as it travels from Taos to Farmington in New Mexico.

As we drive through the barren desert, with nothing for miles around, the monotony is broken by the sight of a hitchhiker, who optimistically sticks his thumb out for the passing camera car.

But our cruel driver cruises on past, while heartlessly documenting this man’s plight from all angles.

As we drive off into the distance, with no other cars to be seen for miles, the man doubtless vows that he’ll only ever use Live Search from now on…

Thanks to Rob.

Locations: New Mexico / Categories: Street Views

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Street View Update March 08

Alex Turnbull — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:18:43 +0000

It’s been just over a month since Google added 12 new US cities to Street View, and yesterday we got new imagery in another 13 cities, and interestingly, a US national park! Here’s some of the highlights, including links straight there:

Finally, Google have also added imagery for the few roads that run through Yosemite National Park, California, which enables us to see some pretty stunning scenery.

Here’s El Capitan, a 910 metre vertical rock formation that’s a popular challenge for rock climbers, and some spectacular Giant Redwoods living up to their name!

Read the full story at the Google Lat Long Blog, read more about El Capitan and Giant Redwoods at Wikipedia.

Locations: Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin / Categories: Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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Events in Google Earth

James Turnbull — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:49:04 +0000

The cliquey Foo Camp was born out of a joke at O’Reilly that they should create a literal “Foo Bar”. The event is held each year at O’Reilly’s headquarters and during the 2006 event (held during August 25-27, 2006) Google organised a flyover photograph for inclusion in Google Earth.

The very high-resolution image shows the “tech superstar” attendees lying around the grass with a simple “Welcome to Foo Camp” sign, but surely it was a missed opportunity for writing messages with human bodies? Of course, if the Google Sightseeing team are invited to next year’s Foo Camp, then we’ll definitely organise everyone to spell out a rude message.

Updated: It turns out that the Foo Campers did draw exciting things in the Orchard, it’s just that only a small part of the image was uploaded to the default Google Earth layer. I’ve created a Google Earth image overlay of the full-sized image (2.28MB).

The Wirefly X Prize Cup was a space exposition held during October 20-21, 2006, that featured all sorts of space related fun including “Live rocket launches, prize competitions, rocket plane flights, jet pack flights, astronaut talks, an entire space theme park on the ground, and much more.”

As part of the event the organisers released lots of Google Earth content, including 3D models and the Google Earth Space Atlas, all of which can be downloaded from the Google’s mini site.

More info: FooCamp wiki on the overflight and Google Earth Blog post on the Wirefly X Prize photograph.

Locations: California, New Mexico / Categories: Aircraft, Crowds, Large Type, Spacecraft

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The White Sands National Monument & Missile Range

Alex Turnbull — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 20:21:00 +0000

This is the utterly bizarre, and totally incredible White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, USA. The monument is the southernmost part of a 710 square kilometre (275-square mile) field of startlingly white sand dunes, which are composed of gypsum crystals which are water soluble, but as there’s no sea outlet, all the dissolved gypsum from the surrounding mountains collects here instead.

You can picnic, sandboard, and take guided orientation and nature walks here, however I’m pretty sure the guides won’t let you wander too far, as the monument is within the White Sands Missile Range. They actually close the monument to the public roughly twice a week to conduct tests! The most famous weapon tested at this range was the first ever detonation of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 – the infamous Trinity Test.

The brand-newly launched Yahoo Maps Beta has some stunning high-res images of the test site (and some very nifty features too). Compare the Google image with the Yahoo one:

We look forward to receiving a deluge of Yahoo Maps submissions!

Thanks to Allen Ormond, Shital Shah, Richard, Tim Gregory, Int13, Tyler, Richard Rowley, Kyle, Jeff, Mike, Earl, Alan, Steve Ransom, Rob Marshall, Bruno, Matt Musselman, Mr. Putty, an MP, woowoowoo, Percel and Matt

Locations: New Mexico / Categories: Monuments, Natural Landmarks

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