It's Like A Science Fiction Movie Out There On The Mesas!

The State of New Mexico in general, and the Rio Grande Valley in particular, have been subject to a long, merciless drought for several years. Then abruptly, in the month of September, nearly four inches of rain got dumped on the land. What does that do to the land and the vegetation?

Ecologists note that with the limited rains that are usually available, semi-arid lands can support either grasslands, or shrubs, but usually not a combination of both. Most studies have been about how anthropogenic activities, like grazing, tend to convert economically-useful lands like grasslands into economically-useless lands like shrub zones.

This time, this combination of hyper-xeric weather followed by flooding may do the opposite. The drought was so severe that many shrubs died, and grasses grow quickly once opportunity allows.

Nevertheless, strange weeds grow too. Not just familiar invaders like tumbleweed, but other, more alien infestations. In some cases, weeds are growing in mats. It's scary! Like some kind of science fiction movie!

This is the Rinconada Canyon area of Petroglyphs National Monument, just west of the urbanized part of Albuquerque.  I wasn't supposed to be here.  They had closed trails, for unspecified reasons - probably because the flooding had damaged the trails.

Pretty flowers.  Resemble purple asters, but smaller.

Goathead, or goathead like.  Ugh!

These tubers should be below ground, but the floods changed everything.

Floods came cascading down!

Pretty white flowers, with Mormon Tea.

Roots ripped from the ground!

Erosion takes no time at all when it's flooding!

A long-buried Schlitz beer can resurfaces.

My mother once worked for Nielsen ad agency in Chicago, around 1950.  She talks about a slide show presentation to their client, Schlitz Beer, where some joker had changed all the graphics to read 'Schitz' Beer.  Things did not go well that day.

There's tons and tons and tons of this, and I don't even know what it is!

Hiking trail was instead converted into a waterfall!

Way out west, in To'hajiilee, the floods created serious erosion in this dirt road.

There is a weird, vine-like weed I've never seen before all over the mesas. It's pretty thick in places. It gives the mesas that special green tint. Here's what it looks like east of where Broadway Blvd. joins I-25, in the southern reaches of the South Valley. Clusters of rejuvenated Purple Nightshade are in the foreground.

I think this panspermic spreading mat actually derives from the planetary system of Aldeberan.