On to New Mexico

Monday April 16th:
We left Abilene, TX heading for Carlsbad, NM this morning. Plan to drive on out I-20 to Pecos, TX then cut a sharp right and head north on US-285 from Pecos to Carlsbad. The scenery continued to change as we drove west moving from the "Big Country" region with the trees getting shorter and more scrubby and the land gradually flattening until we were in what I think of as the Plains area. We crossed over into the "Permian Basin" not far eastof Midland and Odessa and we could feel that we were driving on what was once the bottom of an inland sea. Many salt lakes and salt basins along the road as well as factories processing Gypsum left over from the drying up of the seas. Very curious about the sudden sharp ridges that rose up from the flat plains and ran for a while the abruptly stopped. Are they fault lines, ancient reefs, or sand dunes? The land was very flat and desolate until Pecos. As we turned north up US-285 we ran into rolling hills and sagebrush for mile after mile. The only houses were abandoned it seemed. Long white dirt/sand roads cut off from the highway and ran perfectly straight to the horizon or sometimes to one of the many oil rigs pumping along.
Crossing into New Mexico we began seeing signs of humans again and then just north of the border groves of Pecan trees and fields of what I guess to be rice planted in paddies. We didn't expect rice paddies in New Mexico. Stopped 13 miles north or Carlsbad at the KOA near Artesia.