Posted on 01/30/2014 11:27:22 AM PST by Kartographer
It’s not uncommon to fork them into drums and burn them, but just lighting up a pile in the backyard would be a very bad idea.
Is this New Mexico ???
This is the Clayton Hail Glacier of August 2004.
I remember those days from my youth.
1956, McKormic School in Farmington NM. We kids made tumbleweed forts on the play ground. Had lots of fun in them till the weekend and the next Monday we found the custodian had burned them. And HE did not even have to pile them.
1961, Carlsbad NM. The radio (KAVE) issued warnings on what streets to avoid due to tumbleweeds blocking the roads.
1967 Walker AFB Roswell NM. The service building entrances were blocked so bad it took about an hour to clear a way in. If the Russians had launched and attack we would have been toast.
The only problem was that our car had velour upholstery and I was never, ever able to completely get rid of the stickery leftover chaff.
I always wondered who put that there. I always got a kick out of it.
Which do I hate most? Tumbleweeds or goatheads (Sandburrs). I think it would be goatheads. No wonder the goat head is a sign of Satanists.
Clovis is a pretty good-sized town in eastern NM. There’s an Air Force base there and everything. It’s the last stop on Hwy 60/84 in NM before you come to the thriving metropolis of Lubbock, TX. :^)
Goatheads.... GRRRRRRR
Nice! Nice homepage as well...can’t remember the last time I saw a RoadRunner around here...had to be sometime in the early 2000 time frame at Edwards AFB...awesome birds...watched a program on NGC about them a few weeks ago...quite informative.
Goatheads are evil...hate them things...
I lived in the Farmington area for 4 years. Learned the joy of burning large piles of tumbleweeds.
I always thought that about the goat head shape.
[ I lived in the Farmington area for 4 years. Learned the joy of burning large piles of tumbleweeds. ]
They make wonderful crackling noises!!!
Yeppir. Russian Thistle. I bought one to put “fairy lights” on a couple of Christmases ago.
While looking for them online, I came across a site that said they were used (or being used) to clean up radioactivity somewhere. I didn’t really fathom how.
They’re vicious little critters, a mass of thorns. Warning should anyone try to use them as a decoration (handle with extreme care & leather gloves), but they’d make a pretty fair deterrent piled up against a fence, better than Pampas Grass.
Decades ago I was driving a low slung 914 across New Mexico and went into a tumbleweed filled wind storm coming out of the south crossing my highway path at right angles.
In some cases you could see them coming and in other cases highway fringe grades would hide their approach until they popped out in front of you at 40 miles an hour driven by the winds. Some of them were 48 inches in diameter so they were much taller than my horizontal vision line.
It took a lot of steady nerve to keep driving right through them and initally now swerve, brake or flinch at my young age at the time. I had no raditor/fan/belt combination in front to get clogged or debris filled, so it was simply a matter of bashing through the hundreds I encountered in a 200 mile streatch of 1970s erea highway.
If I had been in a tall sedan or pickup, it would not have been so bad, but a low sportscar — wow.
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