Cross-Country Road Trip! Day 9, Mile 1858: Why Did the Elk Cross the Road?.

Outside of Phoenix we ventured into new territories, parts of Arizona and New Mexico neither of us have ever seen before.

This is the way a road trip should be: unexplored vistas, roads that stretch into your imagination.

We drove through many different landscapes, from flat desert to mountain forests and everything in between.

There are vast plains spiked with thousands of saguaro.

The wildflowers were in full bloom.

The palo verdes were glowing with bright yellow flowers.

This time of year the desert is almost green, with foliage sprouting from the most unlikely spots.

The high plains of New Mexico: pale grasses and rosy soil under a serene cloudscape of deep blue and brilliant white.

So why did the elk cross the road?

Because we stopped the car to take their picture and they got spooked.

Just northwest of Socorro on the Plains of San Agustin, we came across the Very Large Array. The VLA is a Y-shaped configuration of 27 82-foot radio dishes. Together they deliver the effective resolution of a single radio telescope 22 miles wide.

The location in a valley shielded from radio interference on all sides in the low humidity of New Mexico at almost 7,000 feet makes possible an unprecedented range of observations of distant galaxies.

The dishes are mounted on tracks so they can be repositioned as needed.

We finished the day in Socorro. Not really a happening burg, but convenient to our needs.

P.