Fish Fence

Comfort Castle Location: Brantley Lake State Park, New Mexico
Adventure Location: Carlsbad, New Mexico

11:30 pm NEWS Edit: In case some readers happened to know the super nice lady and my good friend Luella Amendt. She was the manager of the City of Sinton Rv Park for the last several years. I received an email tonight that she passed away tonight from her fight with cancer. My prayers go out for her.

This adventure certainly did not happen anything like it was planned. First on leaving the Castle was a short stop at the Pecos River. You cross it to come or go from the campground. Last time here the river was a trickle. This time it is flowing nicely. In fact during nearly all of this three day weekend there have been folks down at this crossing playing in the water. This picture is standing at the swimming hole looking straight across the river.


Next on the agenda was into Carlsbad to check out the golf course and play golf. WRONG AGAIN AS USUAL. The golf course looked wonderful underneath all the people on the course. Oh well at least they seemed to be having fun.

Plan B Hmm what is that? Carlsbad has a very nice river walk section right in town. It was visible from the golf course parking lot. It looked nice so go check it out. This plan sort of worked out until Backward Charlie and I met up.

But let us start from the first. Leaving the golf course parking lot consisted of a wrong turn then several more wrong turns. Finally one of the parking lots for the river walk was located and it was about fifty feet from the golf course parking lot. If only I had turned right instead of left. My excuse is that the shrubbery at the street obscured the entry to the river walk. Sounds good anyway doesn’t it.

When the team FINALLY got back to the river walk entrance the fire department had part of the entrance roadway blocked. They motioned me on in and past the fire trucks to the normal parking lot. From there it was my intent to walk as much of the river walk as could be done. WRONG AGAIN AS USUAL.

First was a short stroll to the waters edge to get an upstream picture.
And then a down stream picture. That green walkway is a floating walkway that was going to be my access to the other side.
The walkway supposedly makes a six mile loop around the impounded Pecos River. It is lighted at night and very pleasant it appears. The propaganda says that they rent paddle craft to use on the lakes. It looks very good for a yak to play on it also.

My path started downstream for no particular reason and immediately this extremely large area of kid play equipment came into the view finder of the camera.
This is only about half of the stuff in this fenced area. There is some out of the picture to the left and right and behind the part that you can see. My tour only got to cover a few hundred yards of the river walk. Across the river and farther down the river was more kid equipment.

It happened that the Truck was parked in the parking lot for Riverwalk Center. It is the old power house for Carlsbad.
It has been converted to an older kid’s type of place. Backward Charlie and OFM went in it to look around. They are setting up a spook house for Halloween inside. It was teenagers working on setting it up. In another section was some video arcade games and it appeared a big open area for basketball and dancing. All in all it was impressive.

NOW who is Backward Charlie??? As my path passed the Riverwalk Center it wandered up to a weird looking steel item. When my path went to the opposite side of the steel item there was this nice fellow wandering around with a GPS in his hand. That is a sure sign of a Geocacher. Google Geocache if you do not know what it is about. When my question about Geocaching was asked, his reply was yes he is. We talked for a good bit and my assistance was provided in looking for the cache.

BC is from Austin and is a single traveler but not an RVer. He is slowly making his way home. It is still hot in Austin for now and he is waiting for cooler weather to get back home. Backward Charlie is his Geocache name as mine is Texnomad. Geocaching in my life way predates the OFM name used now. We found the Geocache eventually. Here is a picture of BC putting it back in the hiding spot. Notice the dam in the background. Geocache chasing can be a lot of fun.

A park worker happened along after dousing us with the sprinklers and we found out lots of neat stuff about Carlsbad but tonight you get to hear about the fence on the dam.

It seems that for years the vegetation in the water had stifled much enjoyment of the lake. Then grass carp were introduced to the lakes. BAM in two years the vegetation was under control. At first the city had trouble with the carp jumping over the dam and heading on downstream toward Lake Amistad. Sterile grass carp are not cheap so you want to have them stay where they are needed. The fence was added to the dam so the grass carp could not jump over the dam. At least that is the story told to us.
By now it was well past lunch time. My whole walk may have been a quarter mile one way at the most. The good news is that that leaves a lot of park to cover with more blog entries. Lloyd of Wandrin is right, you can not possibly see and do it all in one lifetime.

And now it is late and the entry is up to over three pages plus photos. It is time to get some rest to be ready for tomorrow’s action of trying to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.