Onward and Northward (that's like upward, right?)

The next few days were spent meandering in a round-about way toward Santa Fe. The part of New Mexico we passed through was populated by very small towns, or ghost towns, and was mostly open valleys with the occasional small mountainous outcropping. The remoteness of the area is what makes it an excellent location for the NRAO VLA (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Very Large Array), with dishes so sensitive they could pick up a cell phone call on Jupiter. The VLA will be familiar if you’ve seen the Jodie Foster movie, Contact, or one of the many other films made there.

We decided to indulge our nerdiness with a visit to the VLA, to see just how big a very large array is. Turns out, it’s pretty big. There are 4 different arrangements for the dishes, using the designations A, B, C, and D. They sit on tracks so that they can move to be clustered tightly together in the D formation, or spread out 22 miles across the valley, in the A formation. According to the walking tour brochure, “each of the 27 antennas in the array weighs over 230 tons, is 82 feet across, and over 90 feet high.” The information from each individual dish in the array is merged to create the same effect as one enormously powerful telescope.

There’s a self-guided tour around the grounds, and the dishes moved several times while we were walking around. It’s a little surreal to look along a line of antennas stretching into the distance, and watch them tilt and rotate with one synchronized motion.

After we satisfied our inner scientists, we headed back down the road to the tiny town of Magdalena to find lunch. We finally found the one place that was still open, and ordered their special, which turned out to be one of the biggest burritos I’ve ever seen. Groaning our way back to the RV, we climbed into the mountains to a little gem of a campground that, according to the maintenance guy, locals try to keep secret. Unfortunately for them, the road atlas people know about it.