07-Jan-2001 -- Bouyed by our success on New Year's Day, we packed a Thermos
of coffee, grabbed the camera, GPS, and dog, and set forth on
a cool but pretty Sunday morning to do it again. I had been
through the general area of 34N/101W a time or two, and my most
noteworthy memory of up there was a telephone book about a
quarter-inch thick containing listings for nineteen towns.
It had Yellow Pages, too.
My maps indicated that the confluence was just off US Highway
62, between Matador and Dougherty, Texas. We approached from the
west, stopping at a roadside park a mile or two away to set up
a waypoint on the GPS. The park is at the eastern edge of "The
Caprock," aka the LLano Estacado, explored by Coronado back in
1541 without the aid of GPS units or even roads. The cap is maybe
200 feet high at this spot, and below it is broken grazing
land with lots of cedar dotting the native grassland.
A (probably private) road was just where the topo map showed
it, and led north to within 100 feet or so of the confluence
point. A quick scramble across a large gulley brought me to the
exact point, according to the sattelite network. My photo of the
eTrex didn't turn out, however.
Pictures 1,2, and 3 showviews to the northwest, north, and
east, respectively, and I hope they give a feeling of the openness
of this country. Picture 4 shows the eTrex sitting on the spot
by a small cedar.