Last week, we accompanied our grandkids on a tour of Lincoln County where I grew up in southern New Mexico. Our trip included stops at the Smokey Bear museum in Capitan, the Malpais lavabeds north of Carrizozo, old Lincoln, Fort Stanton, Ruidoso and other points in between. On the way, we stopped at the International Space Museum in Alamogordo, which the grandchildren thoroughly enjoyed, including a stop at the museum’s gift shop.

At the gift shop, pieces of “Trinitite” were on sale, starting at $80 for the tiny sample shown below and up to $450 for larger chunks of the “mineral.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Trinitite, it was created when the first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945 at the Trinity site southeast of Socorro. The heat generated in the blast of the atomic bomb was so intense that scientists first concluded it had melted desert sand at ground zero into a strange greenish glass-like substance that was dubbed Trinitite.

The bomb was developed by scientists in the 1940s at the secret Los Alamos laboratory as part of the effort to end World War II. Los Alamos is about 200 miles north of the test site, a remote desert location on what was then the White Sands Bombing Range. Main components of the bomb were driven from Los Alamos to the test site, with final assembly done in an abandoned ranch house on the property. Code named as the “gadget,” the bomb created temperatures in excess of 14,000 degrees (8,430 Kelvin) when it exploded on that stormy morning about 5:30 a.m. Residents as far away as 150 miles felt and saw the explosion, which the U.S. Army explained away as an accidental munitions explosion on the bombing range.

After the explosion, the ground around ground zero was covered with the greenish glass-like material. Later research led scientists to conclude that the substance was created when sand was sucked up into the fireball of the explosion, then literally rained back down on the ground. Some of those pieces of melted sand formed tiny spheres which scientists now believe were “drops (like water) that cooled and hardened enough to keep their shape when they hit the ground.”

The site remained off limits to the public for many years, and in 1952, the Atomic Energy Commission scooped up much of the still radioactive contaminated dirt and trinitite and hauled it away. There were still enough pieces of the crusty green glass around that people found a way to acquire and collect it.

For some reason, my brother managed to get a piece of Trinitite when he lived in New Mexico in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I suspect he had arranged a tour of the site as a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal and picked up a sample of it of it then, but I never got a chance to ask him about it before his death in 2004. I inherited it after his death and have it displayed at our home. It is about an inch and one-half long and about an inch wide and is encased in a round piece of clear plastic, which I assume was done to limit any radiation danger. To be honest, it’s not very attractive — maybe looking like a ragged fossilized booger from an ancient dinosaur. A photo is below.

The U.S. Army now allows tours to the Trinity site twice a year. My wife and I took a tour a few years ago and enjoyed the visit. You can still see pieces of Trinitite on the ground nearby the blast site, but it is illegal to pick them up and take them away as a souvenir. However, I recall that when we came to the gate to get on the Missile Range to begin the tour, there was a guy sitting behind a roadside table with a canopy cover selling Trinitite samples he had acquired somewhere over the years. Of course, they might just have been fossilized dinosaur boogers.

Yogi Berra’s famous quote may have more significance than I thought, given some developments around our house.

My wife recently started noticing a dramatic decline in certain items in our every day eating utensils. We were down to just two forks and four spoons after originally having eight of each when we acquired the set years ago when we were first married.

I used the word acquired rather than purchased because we got the set using S&H Green Stamps we had saved when grocery stores and other retailers offered them as a sales incentive.. They peaked in popularity in the 1950s through the 1960s, but were still around by the early 1970s when my wife used them to buy the flatware set from Oneida.

There’s a whole other story about S&H Green Stamps, but I won’t go into it now, except to say that my mother was a great fan of them. I remember licking glue on large blocks of the stamps and pasting them into thick paper books about the size of a pocket calendar and accompanying her to the “Green Stamp Store” to redeem them for what seemed to be many of our household furnishings.

But on to the mystery of missing forks and spoons. My wife’s suspicion was that when we have guests (mostly family members with young children), they accidentally get tossed into the trash when everyone tries to help clean up the kitchen. It sounded like a reasonable explanation, but I decided to look up the phenomena online and see if we were the only family suffering from this insidious plot to spirit away forks.

When you go to Google and start typing “missing for…,” the queue of answers fills up instantly with many explanations before you even finish typing the last letters “…ks.”

Here’s one story from the search:

“Something “is definitely happening in my kitchen drawers. Suddenly I have nothing but 87 butter knives, a smattering of spoons and a couple shrimp forks. I am down to eating with toothpicks and plastic cutlery from gas station delis.”

And another:

“Those forks are spirited away by the Fork-Faction, taken to a secret, underground bunker where they are melted down and turned into wire coat hangers.“

And another:

“I am seriously wondering if tricks are being played on me? Is there a fork conspiracy going on? Are they being thrown away while everyone pleads the 5th? I have asked the rest of my flatware if they can shed some light on my dilemma. Like everyone else, they just sit there and stare at me, not uttering a word or giving up any information on the whereabouts of my missing forks. Geez!“

And this spiritual offering,:

“You might be wondering, ‘What could possibly be spiritual about missing forks?’ Well, it turns out that the Universe has a way of communicating with us through the objects and situations we encounter in our daily lives. In this article, we’ll explore the spiritual meaning of missing forks and discuss the six messages that the Universe may be trying to communicate to you.

I chose not to read any more after the first paragraph.

And although I’m not a user of TikTok, I found this link when I searched for “missing forks”(Clicking the link may bring in some other posts, but the one about forks is the only one I wanted):

@ezsnb

Its basic mom math…The case of the missing forks🍴#momproblems #momsoftiktok #ezsnb #fyp

♬ original sound – Emma Banes

So below are some of the new forks my wife ordered after doing her own search for “replacement flatware” on Amazon.

But if you come to a fork in the road, pick it up and put it in your pocket. You might just need it some day.

Being as close as Las Cruces is to the border with Mexico, it’s not surprising that smuggling — in both directions — has been going on in this area for centuries.

As you may recall, I resurrected my finely honed investigative reporting skills (yes, that was a joke) about three years ago to find out if Mexican bologna was available in our area. There had been several news reports about large scale smuggling of Mexican bologna into the United States and I wanted to determine if this evil encased meat was lurking in the dark alcoves of local ethnic-oriented grocery stores. Indeed, I was able to acquire some and even consumed it, only to conclude that it wasn’t as tasty as the good old American-made Oscar-Meyer brand.

Last week there was a news story about eggs from Mexico being smuggled into the United States at El Paso because of the dramatic rise in prices due to the bird flu epidemic. I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to try to track down some smuggled eggs in Las Cruces, but I did decide to look up the topic of “smuggling” in the Las Cruces area in old newspapers.

In my subscription to “Newspapers.com,” I set a range from 1850 to 1925 to search for stories using the word “smuggling” in old issues of the Las Cruces Sun-News and the Rio Grande Republican. I found a lot and some are worth mentioning.

In the early 1900s up to the mid 1920s, it appears there were quite a few instances of Chinese being smuggled into the area from Mexico, apparently to be used a laborers.

On Feb. 20, 1909, a story in the Rio Grande Republican spoke about the preliminary hearing for a train conductor and a “Negro porter” who had put eight men from China in a train going from El Paso north to Santa Fe. A man who was identified as a “Chinese inspector,” admitted on the stand that for some “financial consideration,” he looked the other way when the Chinese were put on the train.

Another story in the Rio Grande Republican about a similar incident from 1911 announced that an investigation had been initiated into “Smuggling Chinks.” (Pardon the politically incorrect terminology).

In another story about that same period, the local newspaper announced the latest smuggling scheme as “The Japs are Coming.” (More non-PC terminology)

“Commission (not identified) men report that a great influx of Japs may be expected in the (Mesilla) Valley right after the first of the year,” the newspaper reported. “Many of them are preparing to leave California, where unfavorable laws have been passed.”

Smuggling involved other things, as you might expect. There was one story from 1905 about smuggling of Mexican horses across the border and another one about cattle a few years later. There was also a report from the Prohibition era in the El Paso Times of two men who had smuggled 72 gallons of tequila and one gallon of another unidentified intoxicant headed for New Mexico. The report says the smugglers were spotted by “sentinels perched in the top branches of a lofty tree that stood starkly against the sky along the New Mexico-Mexican border…”

And of course, things go the other way as well. Two wholesale grocery establishments in El Paso were shut down for “smuggling four and sugar to the Mexican side…” sometime in the early 1900s, according to another story in the Rio Grande Republican.

The strangest smuggling story I discovered was about a group of men in the Rincon area (north of Las Cruces) who had decided to round up dogs they thought “deserved banishment” and “smuggled them in empty (railroad) box cars” to be sent off and discovered days later in depots of towns down the line. The scheme was reported in a letter to the editor of the Rio Grande Republican from Oct. 6, 1893.

“This company (of men), in their zeal to promote the welfare of the public, forgot to ship any of their own dogs,” the letter to the editor said. “It (the smuggling of dogs into outbound box cars) seems to be comprised of a few unworthy citizens who propose to reform the old time-honored style of dog (ownership)…”

It was a heartless approach and I am hopeful it was discovered and stopped.

So based on the stories I read, smuggling efforts seem to get caught, including the latest attempt with Mexican eggs. But I’ve thought of a plan to get us more cheap eggs in the United States. What if someone just releases a flock of laying hens in Mexico near the border with New Mexico. They could easily slip in between the gaps in the border wall, strut into New Mexico, and suddenly become “free range” chickens — even better for the quality of eggs, as we’ve been led to believe.

We recently bought a dozen eggs from a “natural grocer” in Las Cruces for $12+ a dozen — more than a dollar per egg. I think I’ll give my “free range” chicken — border style — a try.

I’ve been working my way through a book edited by my former journalism professor, Tony Hillerman, entitled “Best of the West: An Anthology of Classic Writing from the American West.”

The book contains 142 short stories on a variety of subjects, mostly historical in nature. Under the section of the book entitled “Tall Tales and Practical Jokes” is an entry called “How trout survive mountain waters.”

The gist of the story is that old timers in the Salida area of southern Colorado, just north of the San Luis Valley (which many people think rightfully belongs to New Mexico) claim that winters were so cold in the region that some species of trout grew fur. A story in the 1938 Pueblo (CO) Chrieftan claimed someone from Kansas had written to the Chamber of Commerce in Salida asking if there was truth to the rumors of fur-bearing trout. The tongue-in-cheek article concluded that one old timer claimed that “There’s still some of them around, if you know where to look, which I do, but I ain’t tellin'”

“Their fur is pretty few and fur (sic) between compared to what it was,” the old timer said. “And they ain’t near as fur-bearin’ as they wuz, not near.”

This made me think of my years-long quest to catch a Gila trout in the Gila Wilderness of southwestern New Mexico. I wrote a post about this last August, when I was finally able to catch some of the elusive species on Mineral Creek, just north of Whitewater Creek. I had written many articles during my career as a journalist about efforts to help the trout species recover in the waters of southwestern New Mexico.

While attempting to dig through some old photographs, it occurred to me that I might have actually caught a few Gila trout years earlier when my son, daughter, a friend and his son hiked into the upper part of Whitewater Creek in the Gila Wilderness. All of the kids, I recall, were still in elementary school, yet managed a several mile hike on a tough trail just east of the ghost town of Mogollon to the upper reaches of Whitewater Creek. We caught several fish on the hike and at the time, I assumed they were just rainbow trout, since they are fairly similar in coloring.

I vividly recall a photograph of my daughter, Lindsay, holding a stick with four or five tiny trout we had managed to catch on that hike into the Gila wilderness. I did a cursory search for that image and could not locate it in dusty boxes in our hallway closet where we stash photographs chronicling many fun adventures with our children. Even if I could find it, I doubt I would be able to verify the species of trout we caught because the fish were so small and the quality of the photograph likely left something to be desired.

At any rate, the Gila trout are not a fur-bearing variety, as the old timers in southern Colorado claimed they had seen. My biggest concern for the species is the dramatic decline in precipitation we have experienced this winter in southern New Mexico. I think the Gila Wilderness has had a little more moisture than we have had in the Las Cruces area. But for an already challenged ecosystem, the coming of the spring winds makes the risk of devastating forest fires an even bigger challenge for the Gila country and the Gila Trout.

The wind outside my home office is howling as I write this, sucking out what little moisture might be left in the arid landscape of southern New Mexico. I hope the Gila is spared of more disastrous springtime fires that have threatened this tiny yet hardy species.

A friend and neighbor asked me last week if I was interested in helping with a project that I had never known about until he extended me the invitation. It’s called the “New Mexico Ramp Project.” It is a volunteer-based program to construct wheelchair accessible ramps to homes of low-income disabled residents in 15 New Mexico counties.

Individuals who qualify can request a ramp be constructed at their home at no cost. Several private companies in the state have provided funds for the program as well as receiving some support from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority. Those seeking a ramp must fill out a simple request form that is reviewed by the organization before approval is given. Tools, decking screws and lumber are supplied by various organizations or through donations. A shipping container in a lot in an industrial area not too far from our home is used to store the equipment in between projects. It’s not unlike the Habitat for Humanity program, which I have volunteered for in the past, but on a much smaller and more focused scale.

I agreed to help with the program last Saturday. In about two hours, a crew of about 15 people were able to construct a wooden ramp with a 5% grade at the side of a mobile home that it turned out was owned by a woman I knew who used to work for a local car dealership.

Work on the ramp begins earlier in the week before installation, with construction of a standardized framework which is attached to the home or mobile home at the front door or on an existing porch. Once the framework is installed at the home, workers complete the ramp by installing treated wooden decking and railings.

At the project last week, we seemed to have an overkill on volunteer workers. I think we could have done the job with about half the number of workers we had, but no one complained and everyone offered some bit of assistance.

It’s one of those programs that many people don’t know about that goes on in our state and is a great reminder — despite all the turmoil in the nation these past few weeks — that good things can be done to help the needy by volunteers. According to the organization’s website (which I have shown below), this kind of program exists in several other states around the nation and was started in Texas several years ago. The New Mexico program was started in 2019, largely through the efforts of an individual who worked with the highly successful Texas program.

nmramp.org

The program received accolades two years ago from New Mexico Magazine as one of the state’s “True Heroes.”

Here’s a link to the video below if you want to watch. It gives kudos to several volunteer programs throughout the state, but it runs about half an hour. You can fast forward to the segment about the New Mexico Ramp Project at about 11:50 into the video.

The New Mexico Legislature, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, always seems to have time in between debate on major issues to bring a bit of levity or silliness into their work.

Witness in the last few years that we have added adopted legislation that declares the “official” state almost everything.

We have the official state question — “Red or Green.”

Then the official state answer — “Red, green or Christmas.”

The official state aroma — Roasting green chile.

The official necktie — Bolo tie.

The official cookie — Biscochito

The official state aircraft — Hot air balloon.

The official insect — Tarantula hawk wasp

And the list goes on. New Mexico had of them as of 2024. You can click on this link to see the entire list in proposed legislation to add a new one:

https://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/25%20Regular/bills/senate/SB0498.html

The new “official” something is being proposed in Senate Bill 498. It declares the “lowrider” be designated as New Mexico’s “state vehicle.” As of this writing, the legislation has not been given final approval and is pending in a Senate Committee. A copy of part of the legislation is shown below:

The actual wording in the legislation is: W. The lowrider is adopted as the official vehicle
of New Mexico.“

Somehow, I always thought a battered Ford F-150 pickup truck with mismatched wheels, faded paint, mangled bumpers and non-working turn signals would be our official state vehicle.

And not to be outdone, a bill has been introduced in the New Mexico House of Representatives declaring August as the “New Mexico Red and Green Chile Month.”

That bill is pending in a Senate committee as of this writing.

All of this brings to my mind other things that we might need to declare as “official” in New Mexico. How about these?

Official state noxious weed — Tumbleweed.

Official state weather phenomena — Howling spring winds.

Official state burrito — Breakfast burrito.

Official state road hazard — Pothole.

Official state eyesore — Plastic Wal-Mart bag fluttering in the wind on a mesquite bush.

Official state butt of jokes — Espanola.

Official state bad government poster city — Sunland Park.

Official state building material — Adobe brick.

Official tacky souvenir — Carved howling coyote.

And of course, the official state state — New Mexico.

If you have others to offer, send them my way and I’ll publish them.

I suspect when you think of organ music, long dark-themed dirges come to mind — like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor during which the entire concert hall vibrates when the lowest notes are played.

My wife and I were pleasantly surprised last weekend when we attended a free local concert given by John S. Dixon, a British born concert organist and composer who has lived in Virginia since 1988. When he turned 50, he decided to perform a concert in each of the 50 United States by the time he was 70. He’s now 67 and has nine more states in which to perform. New Mexico was the 41st to hear his talents.

All of the music played was arranged or composed by Dixon and it was uplifting, with modern chording and entertaining descriptions of the music. It included arrangements of various American folk songs, some familiar tunes from Great Britain and a clever adaptation of the Irish folk tune “What Do You Do With A Drunken Sailor?“

But most interesting to me was a segment that he does in every state he visits. He researches folk songs from that state, then composes short arrangements of them.

The folk songs he arranged from New Mexico were all from a huge collection of Hispanic folk music that I’d never heard of before. It is called “Hispanic Folk Songs from New Mexico and the Southwest,” written by John Donald Robb. Robb, a New York attorney who moved to New Mexico in 1941, and became fascinated by local Spanish and Mexican folk tunes which had been played throughout the state since the Spaniards arrival in 1540. Robb began recording these folk tunes in towns and villages around New Mexico and started writing a book compiling all the tunes he had recorded or had learned about. The book, first published in 1980 when Robb was 88, is gigantic. At least 5 inches thick and consuming almost 900 pages, it includes the music and lyrics (in both Spanish and English) of hundreds of songs that he gathered.

His collection of recordings in now held at the University of New Mexico. His son said of his father that the people he recorded over the years “…were not just performers, not just subjects to be recorded. They were genuine people…” whose music told much about the fabric and history of our state.

I’m fascinated by his book but it’s currently out of print, and if you find one, it will set you back $75. I’m not quite ready to splurge for that yet, but I think it would be great fodder for many posts on my blog. But thanks to New Mexico State University’s Zuhl Library, I’ve been able to look at some of the book online.

Songs are arranged by category, including romance, death, unrequited love, animals, places around the state, gambling, humor, and many other topics. Listening to Dixon’s arrangements, you could clearly hear how these songs were likely accompanied by a local musician with a lack of training while wrestling with poorly tuned hand-me-down battered guitar. The crude quality of some of the music and singing, as one observer said, was part of the magic of what Robb captured.

Three of the songs that Dixon arranged for the concert were in the “humor” category. One entitled “Yo No Me Quero Casar” was about a man’s frivolous reasons for not wanting to get married. Another, “Don Simon,” was about a man complaining about just about everything modern, especially young people.

My favorite was “El Senor don Gato,” a children’s song about a tomcat that was smitten by a “fluffy, white, and nice and fat” female cat. Here are the lyrics (in English, and not nearly as lyrical as they are in Spanish):

“I adore you, wrote the lady cat, 
Who was fluffy, white, and nice and fat, 
Oh there was no sweeter kitty, meow, meow meow, 
In the country or the city 
And she said she’d wed Don Gato. 
Oh Don Gato jumped so happily, 
He fell off the roof and broke his knee, 
Broke his ribs and all his whiskers, meow, meow meow, 
And his little solar plexis, meow, meow, meow, 
Ay caramba! cried Don Gato. 
Well the doctors all came on the run, 
Just to see if something could be done, …. 
But in spite of everything they tried, 
Poor senor Don Gato up and died, …. 
When the funeral passed the market square 
Such a smell of fish was in the air, 
Though his burial was slated, meow meow meow 
He became reanimated, meow.. 
He came back to life, Don Gato.”

In a passing comment at the conclusion of the forward of the book by Robb’s friend and colleague Jack Loeffler I found this quote about New Mexico and why we love its richly textured history:

“…(In New Mexico) there is an extraordinary sense of cultural homeland. We call it querencia. People who are from New Mexico want to be in New Mexico. If they are not here, they are trying to figure out how to come home. Querencia means all of those things. It comes from the verb querer, to want or to love. It is a place you love. It is a place that you want to be that even has a sense of being the place that you prefer to die in.”

For those of you who might not be aware of ski racing history, Hermann Maier was a phenomenal racer for Austria during the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was known for overcoming an almost fatal motorcycle accident to win two gold medals in the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan. He won many other Olympic and World Cup racing events over his career, becoming the most decorated male skier ever from Austria.

Austrian-born movie actor and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave Maier the nickname “The Hermanator” after the actor’s lead character in the “Terminator” movies in the 1980s.

I was involved in a citizens’ ski racing league in the early 2000s and much admired Maier’s performances, particularly in the downhill event. At that time, Maier raced on Austrian- made Atomic skis and the skis he used for many of his wins were known as “Red Sleds” because of their red color and the speed they gave him.

Of course, I figured that if I had a pair of those, I might become dominant on the citizens’ ski race circuit. (Full disclosure: I won lots of gold medals on the race circuit, but mostly because I got a generous handicap for being, well, um, advanced in age. There were many faster racers, but at least I could say I won gold medals).

So I bought a pair of 200 cm Atomic Titanium Beta Race skis (they even came with a sticker that said “Hermann Maier’s skis”) and raced on them for one year and did well. But then almost overnight, ski design changed. Provoked by the introduction of severe side cuts and the move toward much shorter skis (You can thank American ski race phenom Bode Miller for that trend), my Red Sleds were no longer the cool skis to have. on the race circuit.

Having seen the light, I got the next generation of Atomic race skis and left my old Red Sleds to be abandoned in a corner of the garage. I think I sometimes I could hear them whimpering when I walked by them and noticed the dust they had accumulated.

So what does all of this have to do with anything?

Over the years, I owned many different skis and as I replaced them with newer models, I did not part with them, foolishly thinking they might still have some value. Then about three years ago, I stumbled across an article about making an “Adirondack” style chair out of old skis. Perhaps from wintertime boredom, I finally decided to try to make a chair out some of the nine pairs of old skis that were in the garage.

I was hoping that I had enough skis to avoid cutting up my Red Sleds and also to save my wife’s favorite skis, Rossignol ROC 550s (also long and narrow). The math worked out. I was able to make the chair out of five different pairs of skis, including one set that I bought and never used.

I used two 2X4 eight-foot studs and one 2×6 eight-foot piece of wood to make the frame. I stained the wood, then coated it with urethane spar varnish to protect it from the weather. I attached a 1/4″ layer of plastic on the bottom of the legs to keep the wood from absorbing water when it sits outside on my patio.

Next, I began sawing the skis into two sections. I had to use a carbide blade to cut through the metal used for the ski edges and other internal metal reinforcement. I then attached the tail end of the skis on the seat frame first.

Next I attached the front of my newer Atomic skis upside down on the front of the frame to serve as arm rests. Then I started attaching the tips of the skis to the back of the seat frame, arranging them in an arch with the highest point in the center of the back.

Finally, I reinforced the back of the back of the chair with a 2×4 that connected the tips and the arms of the chair.

Below is the finished product in my back yard.

And here’s a video showing it after completion in my garage.

The cost of the project was pretty cheap, less than $50 for wood, various screws, a metal-cutting blade and stain/sealant. I worked on the project on and off for about four days.

Yes, I know it’s kind of tacky and looks like a remedial high school shop woodworking project, but I think it will be an interesting conversation piece in my back yard. But unless I want to sacrifice the Red Sleds and my wife’s ROC 550s, I’m out of material to make another one. I’ll just enjoy this one for a while as I relax in it and dream about my glory days of slicing through the gates on the slopes. “:^)

The Mescalero Apache Tribe’s Mescalero Fish Hatchery has come through again with help for the Ruidoso White Mountain Elementary “Trout in the Classroom” project. Trout in the Classroom is a nationwide program of the non-profit Trout Unlimited organization. The program is aimed at teaching students the value of preserving clean cold-water fisheries, educating them on biology and ecology, and encouraging them to participate in fishing. I’ve been Trout Unlimited’s coordinator for the program in southern New Mexico.

If you’ll recall, the New Mexico Game and Fish Department delivered 40 triploid rainbow trout eggs to the 3rd grade classes in Ruidoso in late October. By December, all but one of the eggs had hatched and the alevin were swimming around the 50-gallon tank to the amusement of the constantly gawking students.

Then, there was an unexpected die-off of the tiny fish right before the holiday break. By the time the students got back to school in January, only three of the trout were still alive. At least two of those succumbed a short time later, possibly leaving one lurking in the gravel at the bottom of the aquarium.

We’re not sure what caused the die-off, but it was obviously very disappointing to the students at the school.

Last spring a similar program was conducted at the Ruidoso School. However, when it appeared some of the fish food had gone missing, I reached out to the Mescalero hatchery to see if they might be able to spare a small amount of fish food to keep the program going. They willingly agreed to help out, and I stopped by the hatchery on a drive up to Ruidoso to pick the trout chow.

Assistant hatchery manager Tori Marden and administrative assistant Robert Morgan were especially helpful.

The Mescalero hatchery was called again this year to see if they could help with the loss of fish. They agreed to give the Ruidoso school two fingerlings that could be placed in the tank so that students could continue to see the fish grow until their planned release in May.

The two juvenile fish are still doing well, as you can see in the photo below. The teachers thought there might still be one surviving fish from the original batch that hid somewhere in the recesses of the gravel-bottomed aquarium. (Latest report — no recent sightings of the surviving fish which they had named “The Lone Ranger.”)

I drove up to Ruidoso two weeks ago to check on progress of the program and was joined at the school by three members of the Mescalero hatchery. They gave an informative presentation to the students about trout and the Mescalero program and the fully engaged students had lots of questions. Later, one of the Mescalero team helped with some maintenance of the aquarium, including changing out water in the tank.

The students continue to be engaged in the project as well. They help teachers check for water quality in the aquarium and help clean the tank.

So despite a huge setback, the program is still moving along and the teachers report that the two trout in the tank are “growing bigger every day.”

In the meantime, work continues on plans to implement a similar program at Stout Elementary in Silver City, where we hope once-endangered native Gila trout can be raised in the classroom. Stay tuned for more developments.

As you may remember, our dog Chester picked the Philadelphia Eagles to win this year’s Super Bowl, using his enigmatic canine selection process to choose between a green and a red squeaky ball tossed into our back yard. His selection process is made even more incomprehensible since dogs are essentially color blind.

When he picked the green ball, last week we assumed his selection would not bode well for the Eagles. After all, he picked the wrong team for the previous three Super Bowls.

This time, however, he hit the nail on the head — or squeaked the right ball as it were.

He was so proud that he actually took a moment to pose for a photo with the ball that he picked. Normally, he runs away the minute he gets a squeaky ball in his mouth in hopes that I will chase him around the back yard for several minutes before finally running out of breath and giving up. And if I do manage to grab the ball from him, I instantly regret it because of the coating of dog slobber it leaves on my hand.

So he’s anxious to make his next Super Bowl pick, but he’ll have to wait a year. By that time, however, the ball will have rotted away, have been ripped to shreds or is no longer an appropriate color for a team in the contest. But we have time to figure out where to get his next selection tokens. I’m sure Chewey.com can help.

If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t pick the Philadelphia Eagles to win this weekend’s Super Bowl. That’s because Chester, our overly enthusiastic Goldendoodle, has made what is likely to be his fourth bad pick on which team will win the football game.

As we’ve done for the past four years, we’ve tossed two different colored squeaky balls in the air in our back yard to see which one Chester prefers. This year, he picked the green one, representing the Eagles. For the last three Super Bowls, Chester has used this scientifically accurate platform to pick the team he thought would win. But all three times, he picked the wrong team.

Here is the dramatic video of Chester’s scientific selection of the winning team’s squeaky ball:

We’ll report back next week to see how Chester’s selection this year turned out. I hope your wallet isn’t lighter than it was when you first viewed this insightful video. Remember, you were warned.