Tag Archives: Albuquerque

45 Foot Fall From Santa Fe Ski Lift

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From the Santa Fe NewMexican Teen who fell from lift to gain national TV audience after video goes viral

An Albuquerque teenager who was virtually unscathed after falling about 45 feet from a chairlift at Ski Santa Fe earlier this month said he was terrified he would die if he fell, but he couldn’t hang on any longer.

Sheppard said the teen was transported via helicopter to University Hospital in Albuquerque as a precaution because patrollers didn’t know the extent of his internal injuries.

The youth suffered a lacerated liver and tears in both lungs, as well as a hairline skull fracture and a gash on his forehead that required 16 stitches. He spent three days in the intensive care unit, but was released without the need for any surgery and without a single broken bone.

The teen said he’s mostly healed now, but he is still waiting for doctors to clear him to play baseball because of concerns his liver might start to bleed again.

The Whitewater Baldy Complex Fire

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Image from Gila Forest on Flickr.

The Gila Fire is now the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire, named after the Whitewater and Baldy fires merged. It’s currently 15% contained and has burned 217,988 acres. It’s the largest fire in the US and the largest in New Mexico state history.

It was almost a year ago that I was posting about the Wallow fire in Arizona, which burned more than twice what the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire has burned. The Wallow fire produced a lot of smoked that end up in Albuquerque. So far Albuquerque has been spared most of the smoke from the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire.

Why First Solar Built In Arizona Instead Of New Mexico Or Austin

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First Solar was looking to built a factory in either Arizona, New Mexico or Austin. An azcentral.com article looks at what Arizona paid to get the factory built there.

The factory will employ 600 people in Mesa, but it signifies more than that. The facility, operated by an Arizona-based company that is a major international player in solar-panel production, will make Broome’s job of attracting more alternative-energy companies easier.

Had Arizona lost the factory to Austin or Albuquerque, it might have been impossible to attract other solar companies to Arizona, he said.

First Solar wrangled at least $51.5 million in potential incentives out of the state, county and city, bought its land at a steep discount, and – perhaps the clinching factor – scored a discount on its power bills.

“The incentive from New Mexico was staggering. It was, like, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Broome said. “New Mexico was even offering to finance the construction of the building. Texas was a good $20 million less expensive than us.”

The article mentions that they offered a discount on electricity to First Solar, a similar discount was offered to Intel to build their new factory in Chandler. It’s interesting to note that First Solar President Bruce Sohn is a former manger from the Intel Rio Rancho factory.

A Summer Time Trip Up The Sandia Peak Tram

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Albuquerque, like many cites, has a number of attractions that locals consider tourist traps and therefore never go to. I don’t consider the Sandia Peak Tram to be a tourist trap and yet I’ve only rode the tram one other time in my 15 years living here.

The Tram was built in the 1960′s by the Swiss company Bell Engineering. At 14,657 feet long, it is known as the longest tram in the world. During the winter the Tram can be used to for skiing the Sandia Peak Ski area. It’s a convenience when Sandia Peak has good snow, it often does not. The 2009-2010 Ski season had some of the best snow in a decade and I threatened many times to take to Tram for skiing but never did.

During this trip I dined at High Finance Restaurant at the top of the peak. High Finance is not the cheapest restaurant in town, but certainly not the most expensive I’ve ever dined at. Understanding that getting supplies to the top of the mountain is probably more expensive than getting them in town, I have to wonder if the name of the restaurant has anything to do with the cost of the meals. In any case the food was excellent.

The most impressive part of this trip was the storms that appeared to the west of the city (and later that night made it into town). With the sunset behind the storms there was a spectacular show of orange rain that looked like fire falling from the sky. the storms highlighted the multiple mountain ranges, Mount Taylor, Cabezon, etc, where you could see them in layers. I had a tough time coaxing my Sony DSC-HX5V to focusing that far out and yet managed to get quite a few good pictures. Had I known I would be treated to such a show I would have brought my SLR.

Pecos Hiking Trip

Last weekend I went on an overnight hike with two friends to the Pecos. Pecos is located east of Santa Fe, about 2 hours away from Albuquerque. Actually, the hike itself was to the Hamilton Mesa which is north of Pecos.

The original plan was to hike 7 miles in but when we were 2.5 miles in and found some good campsite, why keep hiking? During the day the weather was perfect and in the middle of the night it was piss-ass cold. A good sleeping bag helps with that.

This was an opportunity for me to get geotagging down with my SG-289 data logger and and to take some HDR photographs. The geotagging didn’t work out because the stupid SG-289 didn’t record more than a few dozen points. I swear I read 609 points on it at one time.

HDR photography was much more successfully. I took nearly every picture with auto bracketing on and about a quarter of the landscape photos made good HDR. The two problems with the pictures were moving objects such as wind blowing trees around and most of the photos were taken free hand without a tripod. Photomatix Pro did a pretty good job of aligning images but it can’t do much about the moving objects, at least in this case.

You can view all the pictures in my Flickr set: Sept 2008 Pecos Hike. Note that pictures of people have privacy set so you have to be a friend or family to view them.

Here’s an example of a non HDR and a HDR photo.

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X Prize Cup Countdown Event

It was a cold and rainy day in Albuquerque on Sunday. Las Cruces wasn’t much better. Having drove from Arizona the day before, i wasn’t in a mood for another drive. I eventually got my act together and made it to the event by 3 PM. It cost $6 to get in and about $80 in gas to drive there.

Don’t be fooled by the name of the Las Cruces International Airport. It’s a dinky little airport and they were able to completely close it down for this event. They had us park several miles down the highway at the fairgrounds and bussed us to the airport. The area was set up like a fair, with some dubious businesses in the tents. This makes me think this is for real and private space flight will happen for sure.

I missed Armadillo Areospace’s launch of their craft. Despite the 20 mph winds, they were able to launch and control the craft. However on landing it 2 of it’s 3 feet landed off the landing pad and it tipped over. It didn’t explode but was damaged. Carmack and crew were out in the crowd showing off bits and pieces of their rocket. It’s an impressive machine for sure, they are clearly thinking out of the box with their design.

I did get to see XCOR Aerospace fly their rocketplane, which I have on video. It’s a impressive little craft and was flown as if there was no wind. There was lots of wind, the fact that it was blowing parallel with the runway helped.

Starchaser showed off it’s rocked engine. I think it blew up after it was ignited since there was a big boom, but there was no announcement either way.

When I was leaving the event about 5, they only had 2X and 3X t-shirts. Have I mentioned the wind yet, the winds had picked up quite a bit by this time. There’s nothing like 50 mph blowing sand getting in every orifice of your body. I had a handful of sand in my pockets!

I have pictures of the event on Flickr, and will post a video at some point.

A New City Near Rio Rancho?

I’m for new cities near Albuquerque. A diversity of city management is a good thing. Looks like there’s a possibility of a new city west of Rio Rancho being built over the next 30 years. I hope the county addresses the issue of roads. Right now there are no freeways out that way and as far as I can tell, no plans for any.

An Arizona developer wants to build a new community in Sandoval County that eventually could have 70,000 residents.Recorp of Scottsdale wants to build the community about ten miles west of Rio Rancho.The community would be called Rio West.Recorp has submitted a master plan for about 12-thousand acres to the county.

Also looks like Albuquerque plans to add a chunk to the city the size of Rio Rancho, on the west side of course. Actually planning this development out ahead of time would be the ideal situation, since Albuquerque has done a really crappy job of this so far.

Santa Fe: Minimum $8.50/hr

Santa Fe, the capitol city of New Mexico, has tried to put a “living wage” in effect but was stopped by a lawsuit. The problem with Santa Fe is it’s very expensive to live there. Not only is it the Capitol but seems to attract a lot of the well-to-do.

Yesterday a judge said that the city can go along with it’s wage increase, “Our city council recognized that the $5.15 federal minimum wage just isn’t enough for working families in Santa Fe,” said Maria Cornejo, a local resident who has worked as a cleaner at Santa Fe hotels. Added Carol Oppenheimer of the Santa Fe Living Wage Network, which led the campaign for the ordinance, “With a living wage, the hard-working people of Santa Fe will be better able to support themselves and their families.” Now there are those that worry that businesses will leave Santa Fe for cheaper cites. Albuquerque is only a hour down the freeway. 

Rio Rancho & Lots Of WiFI

Rio Rancho, New Mexico is just butted up against Albuquerque to the north. Thanks to Intel (the largest employer in Rio Rancho and one of the largest in the state) they will have the worlds largest WiFi hot spot. It will cover 103 square miles including residential homes. Funny since you can barley get DSL and no internet via cable.

I lived in Rio Rancho (often called Rio Rathole) when I first moved here. At the time it was mostly a overgrown truck stop with no roads. The road have improved some and the whole city has grown up a lot, it’s good to see some high tech anything moving in.

[Update:] Check out the submission I made to slashdot. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember my password otherwise I would have tons of traffic coming to this site :)