Swingman wrote:

....
We were chasing the Morrow Sand from whence the Sorrento Field produces. I
still think there is another Sorrento in SE CO, but we drilled three wells
of a thirty well program before the bottom fell out of the business in the
middle 80's.

If pigs had wings and we could of just hung on a little longer and hit, I'd
likely be typing this from a villa in Switzerland. ;)

Like many others... My brother was in Midland (he's a vet and went
down there during the boom for a fella' who was rolling in dough and
started a thoroughbred stable. Boom went bust and so did the stud
farm...

The track at Syracuse is still there although I noticed that it looked
like the one outside Holly hadn't operated for a number of years...

You woke a sleeping brain cell ... it was indeed Holly where we used to go.
I was raised around running quarter horses and thoroughbreds (my 83 year old
Dad still has a racehorse farm out of Navasota, Tx,
http://www.hsound.com/WSS/ ), so, having an eye for horseflesh, I used to
like scouring the bush tracks wherever I was.

My grandad was a big fan of the flat track races, too. Used to go down
to Raton, NM, which was the closest to us back then. It's a blast,
totally unlike closed course, of course...

If you ever do the trip from Amarillo again, highly recommend detour to
the Black Mesa area on the OK/NM/CO border west of Boise City...neat
mesa country not too far out of the way and you can head on up 287 w/
just a little jog from Campo...

Did that once ... would love to do it again. Damn, I love that part of the
country. You feel like you have some room to spread your wings.

Great, glad to hear you either discovered it on your own or somebody let
the secret out...
Part is now a "park" but it's still remote enough to not be run over.
As a high school kid I used to trailer the horse over there and ride
over weekends if Dad would let me have at least one Saturday
occasionally off the tractor during warm weather. Felt like I was in
heaven!

The west end of that formation is the Johnson Mesa east of Raton. It's
even more remote and well worth a trip along there if you're ever in
Raton area. We came back that way from Santa Fe last summer after the
unusual stretch of wet weather we had starting in June. It was waist
high grass and green all the way from there home in
mid-August...beautiful, and nearly unheard of for that time of year!
(BTW, mountain snows this year are 110-150% normal so far, so just
maybe we're beginning to finally break this 5-year drought cycle...)