Day 14: Taos Box and a Hippie Home

We awoke relatively early with the intentions of running the Taos Box section of the Rio Grande. The Box is 14 miles of class III-IV whitewater in the bottom of a spectacular 650 foot canyon. The shuttle drive unfortunately is 1.5 hours by car so we figured we would have to meet up with some other boaters to be able to run this section. We asked around town and talked with a few outfitters, and it seemed that the options were to MAYBE hire a shuttle at $80-100 or find some other Kayakers to shuttle with. Here’s the Put-In for this section. The Box only gets deeper from here to the take out.

We waited for a while and asked some of the raft companies, but we never were able to get a shuttle set up, so we had to give up. We drove to the middle of the run to the only bridge over the box. Here’s a shot from the bridge. Way down in the bottom there are two rafts that you can barely see for scale.

Near this bridge is the STAR community of a group called of homes called Earthships. The philosophy of these homes is to be completely off of the utility grid and rely solely on Rain, Sun, and Wind for all Energy and Water needs. The STAR community has one Earthship model that is open for a tour. The Earthship construction is made of used tires, packed with dirt, and then covered with Stucco. Each of the homes collects all of the water from rain and snow that falls on the roof in an indoor cistern that holds all rain water. In this area, the average rainfall is approximately 10” a year, so the water is used 4 times before it is discarded. Here’s the cistern in the model home. Lydia liked the stucco and tile work in the model’s bathroom shown here.

Gray water from the showers, sinks, etc is filtered by an internal “Jungle” area and re-used again. This shot shows the kitchen sink and the accompanying plants. Apparently many of the Earthships grow their own vegetables in this garden for further recycling.
Overall, the Earthship concept has a lot of very interesting ideas about energy conservation and living off of the grid, some of which could be incorporated into a more traditional house. According to the STAR community’s mission statement, they also believe that by not having mortgage payments (By building their own houses from recycled materials) and dependence on utilities they can cure all of the evils of the world from child abuse to war. Ummm… Yeah.

We had the oil changed in the Ody by Ms. Quick Lube (Tattoos and all) and hit the road headed east. Back towards the real world…