Sidetracked Charley

This beautiful area of north central New Mexico where I live has been carved into counties as the population and terrain made it harder and harder to govern. What is now Taos, Colfax and Mora counties was once one huge county. Colfax needs carved again. I suffer the problems on living on its far southwest corner. I am in fact closer to the county seats of Mora and Taos than I am to that of Colfax. In my blog Off to Vote Early I mentioned the difficulty of voting early. It is an hour and 45 minute drive in the best of weather. A couple March's ago it was a 36 hour drive because of snow. I listed some statistics for the County of Colfax in that same blog. Raton is the county seat and the biggest city but has a declining population due to the downfall of mining and the drought which is having a prolonged downward spiral on ranching. As of the 2010 census it was barely over half of the population of the entire county. And my side of the county has grown in population to the point...

On the edge of the plains I live in Colfax County, New Mexico . It and its immediate neighbor to the west, Taos County, was split off from Mora County to the south of me. The county comprises 3,768 square miles of which only 11 square miles is water. Much of the county, the part I live in, is in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Most of the rest is prairie. The largest single city in Colfax County is Raton on the far east side of the state of New Mexico. Or about one and half to two hours drive from where I live. Raton is the county seat. All district court houses are in Raton. If I get called for jury duty I have to make that drive twice a day because the county does not pay for overnight stays for jurors. And I have to drive to Raton to vote early tomorrow. Many of us have come to resent Raton. The county seat was once Elizabeth Town which was a mining center. And then moved to Cimarron which I will pass through on the way to Raton. Cimarron is much more centrally located....