New Mexico Trivia & Tidbits - Page 3

Looking for New Mexico trivia? Try our list New Mexico little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

“The Flying Paperboy of the Guadalupes” monument near Queen is a memorial to Frank A. Kindel, who at one time dropped newspapers from his airplane to ranchers and hunters in the mountains of New Mexico. He died at age 72 when his plane crashed in 1964.

first appeared: 6/29/2008

—Chilili’s (pop. 113) cemetery contains dozens of tombstones made of tin sheets mounted on marble pedestals. The tin art is the work of Horace McAfee, who punched names, dates and musings about the afterlife in the metal sheets with a nail. McAfee also installed tin cutouts of angels to watch over the graves.

first appeared: 6/15/2008

Flutist Robert Mirabal of Taos Pueblo (pop. 1,264) was presented the Native American Album of the Year award at the 50th Grammy Awards last February. The winning album is titled Johnny Whitehorse Totemic Flute Chants and represents Mirabal’s second Grammy in three years.

first appeared: 6/15/2008

—Travelers entering Albuquerque from the east on Interstate 40 in Tijeras Canyon can’t miss Gordon Huether’s 22-foot-tall Aluminum Yucca, an outdoor sculpture representing Southwest desert plant life. The sculpture, erected in 2003, was created from salvaged fuel tanks from military aircraft.

first appeared: 6/1/2008

New Mexico is home to the third-fastest supercomputer in the world. Dubbed “Encanto,” the computer operates at 172 teraflops per second, which is about 30,000 times more powerful than a typical laptop. One teraflop represents 1 trillion calculations per second. Encanto is housed at Intel Corp.’s Rio Rancho (pop. 51,765) plant.

first appeared: 6/1/2008

—Matthew Evans of Albuquerque got the last word at the 2007 Reader’s Digest National Word Power Challenge. The 12-year-old correctly defined the word hegira—a journey to a better place—to win first place and a $25,000 college scholarship.

first appeared: 5/18/2008

—Buried in a former Alamogordo (pop. 35,582) landfill are millions of Atari “E.T.” video games. The games were dumped in 1983 from Atari’s El Paso, Texas, plant, where excess inventory of the game, called the worst in video-game history, were stored.

first appeared: 5/4/2008

Bottomless Lakes State Park near Roswell (pop. 45,293) is noted for its “Pecos Diamonds,” which are quartz crystals formed inside gypsum. The soft gypsum crumbles to expose the “diamonds.” A display of the crystals is in the park’s visitors’ center. Bottomless Lakes State Park is named for its lakes, which appear bottomless. According to legend, cowboys tried without success to find the bottom with lariats tied together. The lakes’ greenish color, from algae and other aquatic plants, creates the illusion of depth.

first appeared: 5/4/2008

—Visitors to the Rancho de San Juan resort between Espanola (pop. 9,688) and Ojo Caliente can view an impressive shrine carved into a sandstone outcropping on the side of a mesa. Sculptor Ra Paulette spent two and one-half years in the mid-1990s creating the hand-carved work of art named “Windows in the Earth.” The shrine’s interior curved walls, cathedral windows, inlaid stones and mirrors to reflect light have made the site a favorite location for weddings and small concerts.

first appeared: 3/9/2008

—Santa Fe bills its Spanish Market as the largest exhibition and sale of Spanish colonial folk art in the United States. Held the last weekend of July, it features 250 artists who sell their works in basketry, bone work, furniture, hide paintings, ironwork, pottery and other media. A smaller Winter Market is held each December.

first appeared: 2/24/2008

The Folsom (pop. 75) Museum houses artifacts from the nearby “Folsom Man Site,” where George McJunkin in the early 1900s discovered spear points embedded in ancient bison bones, proving that humans lived and hunted in the area more than 10,000 years ago. The museum also houses information on the Folsom Flood of 1908, which nearly demolished the cattle town. The town of Folsom was named for Frances Folsom, the 21-year-old beauty who married President Grover Cleveland in 1886.

first appeared: 2/24/2008

—The round barn at the Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs Resort and Spa in Ojo Caliente is billed as the only round adobe barn in the nation. Built in 1924 as a dairy barn, the restored structure is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

first appeared: 2/10/2008

––The 60-acre Pancho Villa State Park in Columbus (pop. 1,765) is located on the grounds of the former Camp Furlong, where Gen. John J. Pershing launched a counterattack against Mexican Gen. Pancho Villa, who in 1916 led a raid against the base and village and killed 18 people. The park’s exhibit hall contains vehicles and technology used by Pershing, including a full-size replica “Jenny” airplane, a 1916 Dodge touring car, military weapons and other artifacts. Columbus also is home to the City of the Sun, a small community whose residents build and live in alternative dwellings made of recycled materials, including tires, bottles, cans, adobe, rocks, and papercrete (recycled paper blended with concrete and water).

first appeared: 1/27/2008

—Snowy River, an underground dry river made of calcite crystals, has been found to be flowing with water for probably the first time in 150 years. At more than two miles long, the river is believed to be the world’s largest single calcite formation. It was discovered by four cavers in Fort Stanton Cave in Lincoln County (pop. 19,411) in 2001 and access is restricted to researchers. Snowy River already has been the subject of major scientific findings, including exotic manganese-eating microorganisms and antibiotic-producing bacteria, which hold the potential for medical and industrial advances.

first appeared: 1/13/2008

—As a fund-raiser to combat heart disease, D.J. Jones of Albuquerque took a motorcycle ride in 2006 through all 50 states, a total of 25,000 miles in 169 days, including a ride by cargo ship to Hawaii. She is believed to be the world’s first person to ride the same motorcycle through all 50 states alone.

first appeared: 12/30/2007

Las Vegas (pop. 14,565) has been the location of many films since the early 1900s, when it was known as a silent film capital. Tom Mix, one of the country’s most famous cowboys, settled in the Plaza Hotel and made many of his silent films in and around the town. More recent movies that used Las Vegas as a filming location were Red Dawn, Easy Rider, Convoy, All the Pretty Horses, and Wyatt Earp.

first appeared: 12/30/2007

—“The Solar Capital of the World” is Taos (pop. 4,700), so proclaimed in 1997 by then Gov. Gary Johnson. The town enjoys about 300 days of sunny weather. KTAO-FM, the locally owned 50,000-watt radio station, is solar powered, and each June residents host the Taos Solar Music Festival with a Solar Village where vendors and organizations tout renewable energy. Famous for its juicy hamburgers, the Bobcat Bite restaurant in Santa Fe was so named because wild bobcats used to hang around the restaurants for scraps from the kitchen.

first appeared: 12/2/2007

—When a flash flood threatened Folsom (pop. 75) on Aug. 27, 1908, telephone operator Sarah Rooke was at the switchboard, warning residents to evacuate their homes for higher ground. She remained on the phone when the flood overtook her own home. Seventeen people drowned in the flood, including Rooke. A granite memorial in Folsom Cemetery, erected by telephone operators throughout the country, commemorates Rooke’s heroism.

first appeared: 11/18/2007

Tucumcari (pop. 5,989) was founded in 1901 as a railroad town by A.D. Goldenberg and several business partners. According to legend, Goldenberg took in two strangers during a three-week-long snowstorm in 1900. The strangers thanked him with the valuable tip that a railroad would soon be laying track through the area.

first appeared: 11/18/2007

—People flying high above a desert mountain near Trementina in San Miguel County (pop. 30,126) can see a mysterious symbol, two overlapping circles with diamond shapes, bulldozed into the side of the mountain. The symbol marks the spot where the Church of Spiritual Technology, a part of Scientology, has built underground vaults to store stainless-steel tablets engraved with the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.

first appeared: 11/4/2007

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