Travel from Kalamazoo to Jornada LTER

(Written by Margaret Mooney, undergraduate student in WMU's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering program.)

We departed from Kalamazoo, Michigan Sunday April 30th at noon. Thirty-six hours and seven states later, we arrived at our destination in Las Cruces, New Mexico at the Jornada Experimental Range. Our first day was rainy the entire drive, but that didn’t stop us from reaching our first destination goal on day one in Springfield, Missouri after ten hours of driving. On the way, we passed St. Louis, Missouri and got a glance at the St. Louis Arch. After driving through St. Louis, we ran into a couple of road blocks. Between an accident involving a semi-truck and flooding over the highway, our trip to Springfield took an extra hour. Nevertheless, we reached Springfield and called it a night. The next morning, we woke up early and headed to our next and final destination of Las Cruces, New Mexico. We didn’t encounter any crazy road closures as we did the day before, but the fourteen hour trip was no easy feat. Still, along the way, we passed by some pretty interesting sights. Fortunately about an hour into Oklahoma, the skies cleared and there were no weather issues for the remainder of the trip.

After Oklahoma, we ventured into the lone star state, Texas. Throughout the majority of our time in Texas, we saw quite a few wind turbines. After encountering them, we decided to look up some interesting facts about turbines and found that a single turbine can produce enough power in a year to support 555 U.S. homes for an entire year (using average statistics).

Finally, after leaving Texas, we reached New Mexico. It was here where we begin to see Mountains for the first time. Most of our travels in New Mexico so far have been through very lightly human inhabited areas, but at any moment, we were surrounded by mountains. Shortly after sunset, we reached Las Cruces and the Jornada Experimental Range.