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.
I lived in the Farmington area for 4 years. Learned the joy of burning large piles of tumbleweeds.
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.