A Veterans Memorial Coffee Walk in Elephant Butte

This is Veterans Day weekend.  We're camped in Elephant Butte, New Mexico.  This morning, as we usually do, we started out on our morning coffee walk before breakfast.  We had spotted a trail at the back of Cedar Grove RV Park and strolled over to see what it was.  A sign at the trailhead told us that it was the "Drifter's Veterans Walk."

We started on the trail, which descended steeply into a wash, where a large memorial stood.

A sign told us that the Veterans Walk was built by Ted Eastburn with only his own money.  The signs indicated that it was built to memorialize members of the military who gave their lives for our country.  We noticed that one small memorial was to Corporal Teddy Eastburn.  We imagined that, perhaps, Teddy was Ted's son, and that Ted constructed this memorial to work through his grief for his lost son, and to memorialize all those young souls lost in a struggle to protect their nation.

Looking past the memorial, we saw that it stretched out into the BLM lands that spread on to the nearby mountains:

In the morning light and mist, the mountains took on a mystical form:

We realized that flags and other markers blazed a trail out into the desert, and we began to follow it.  In places, chairs were placed for the walker to rest on this short spiritual journey:

The trail was marked by a series of 18 stone cairns.  Our trail led us from one to another.

This trail turned out to make a large loop in the desert.  No wonder Ted Eastburn set chairs periodically along its route.

Some chairs carried sympathetic messages:

This is November, and some late small flowers added a touch of color to the otherwise barren landscape:

Each cairn was placed in an unique setting.  This one sat beyond a stone wall symbolically built along a fence line which actually provided a portal to cross the fence:

Yet another chair for the weary traveler:

We found that the trail brought us back to our beginning at our RV park.  We paused to view the end of the trail, with the campground's cell tower marking our destination.

Whatever our individual views of the merits of wars and other struggles our military conducts on our nation's behalf, we must pause and consider the ultimate sacrifice that many individuals have made in service to the protection of us all, in the faith that their military struggle is necessary to our safety.

God bless and protect us and the brave souls who died for us, and consider the horrible sacrifice they made.  Pray for their souls and ours, and guide us to find the right path for our nation.