Day 26: Deming NM - Farmington NM

Sunday.  Opposite of Saturday in that it was a climb back to higher altitudes from the Scorching Plains™ of New Mexico.  Only without all the drama of US-191.  US-180 runs dead straight nearly all the way to Silver City and the only thing worthy of note was this rather silly sign in a rest area:

The views did improve for a while after Silver City, but were nothing like as fab and groovy as wot yesterday's were.  Far fewer trees and lots more roadkill.  Though there was a nice lay-by somewhere up in the hills.

I expect much the same is true for the dismembered parts of the victims of local murderers.

In the pines / In the pines / Where the sun / Don't ever shine, er,oh...

And once the Plains were reached, they were very far from Scorching™ chiz.  And they got even more dull after Gallup, at least until the inselbergs, monadnocks or, as it were, kopjes started to appear.  There's a fair few of these dotted around the desert north of Gallup.  Most of them look a bit like this:

though there's one very oblong one.

Don't look round the back, though, coz it's all held up with wooden props¹

And one very big one:

This is as close as you get, paleface...

This latter is Tsé Bitʼaʼí, "rock with wings" or "winged rock" to the Navajo, or "Shiprock" to the incomers.  It stands about 500 meters above the surrounding non-Scorching Plain™ and this is about as close as you can get if you are neither a Navajo nor a git.  It's sort of like Uluru in that it's terribly sacred to the Navajo, and because it's on private land they are at liberty to tell would-be visitors to git orff it.  Now that's irony.  Over to the west is this rock:

which, as you can see, has a hole.  In it.  I did not investigate this one any further, partly because I think it's actually in Arizona and thus would have confused Sarah the SatNav's clock even more, but mostly because Farmington lies in the opposite direction and I'd already done 400 miles by the time I got there.

Sorry, that was all incredibly dull, wasn't it?  Though I think I heard the bass riff from Lawnmower Deth's "Spook Perv Happenings In The Snooker Hall" being used in a Toyota advertising-announcement in the pizza place this evening.

1. Alternative fact