Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
As I write this column I sit at my home office desk — naked and afraid.
OK, my only fear is knocking out this column before midnight. And I am not that naked. I’m wearing boxer briefs and dress socks, but that’s more than you wanted to know about my column writing.
But I was thinking of another time when I had been naked and afraid.
I’ve recently learned that a new episode of the Nat Geo series “Naked and Afraid,” was filmed right here in eastern New Mexico. It took place 150 miles or so north of here in the Sabinoso Wilderness. That’s right, the very same Sabinoso country I wrote about way back in 2008, about the time it was being studied for a wilderness area.
I picked the show up on-demand after it had premiered and was left somewhat impressed with the two Europeans they had dropped in the middle of an eastern New Mexico wilderness area that few eastern New Mexicans are even aware is out there.
The area is east of Las Vegas 30 miles and north of Tucumcari about the same distance. There’s only one road into the edge of the wilderness area across private land. It sits on land where the Canadian Escarpment has been eroded by water and rough, steep, jagged canyons hold sparse intermittent creeks, except during periods of monsoon flash flooding.
I had previously watched a few episodes of the show but after I figured out they were going to blur out the good parts I lost interest. Most of the people on the show were poorly equipped for survival, naked or fully clothed.
The filming caught the area in a rainy period where the grass on the flat mesa tops was luxurious and hiding the sharp rocks and cacti. The pair knew they had to drop off in the canyon if they were going to find water. The first thing they found in the canyon was a really big rattlesnake.
Bonus points for the buff pair as they proceeded to slay the reptile and save him for supper. They weren’t too careful in field dressing the snake and the female participant from Austria got sicker than a dog that night.
They actually located a fresh spring, which was impressive and allowed them a chance to survive the required 21 days. Food was more of a stretch after the snake was gone. They did manage to trap crawdads, which seemed to mostly be what they survived on. I thought they should have easily found pinon nuts. They could also have caught scads of grasshoppers as lush as that grass grew. Even though the girl had a bow and was a decent shot, she only took one half-hearted effort at hunting the squirrels that hang out in the ponderosa pines on the canyon floor. There should have been turtles and frogs in those ponds besides the crawfish.
On day 19 she finally shot a jackrabbit up on the flats and they feasted before they had to walk out to the extraction site.
Back in the 1960s my family and Travis Gossett’s family took a fishing trip into the Sabinoso, from the east side at the town of Sabinoso. Headed in, as we first got to those rimrock canyons, we came onto a guy mounted on a mule in a Mexican sombrero. He was silhouetted on the skyline at first like a scene out of a Sergio Leon Western. He crossed down to the road and stood by his mule as we met.
Travis began chatting the hombre up and soon inquired if the mule was any good and, was he for sale? “Possibly.” was the reply. “Well can you shoot off ’em?” was Travis’ next query.
The muchacho immediately jerked the hog leg around his waist and fired it off like a thunderclap in that tight-walled canyon. No trade was consummated and we all left with our boots.
We found the fishing hole, which had catfish, crawdads and snapping turtles. We survived the long weekend we were there on bacon and eggs, fish, pork and beans and Vienna sausage. We did get naked down to our skivies for a swim at midday. Our greatest fear had been flat tires and the guy on the mule.
Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:
