Mule Packer,
You have opened my memory bank! Back in the 70's, my regular patrol territory was everything east of Alamogordo in Otero County, NM. The first 19 miles east from US 70 on the north side of Alamo took you from 4000 feet elevation to near 10,000 at Cloudcroft. The section from about 5000 to 6000 feet up or so was filled with apple orchards, as was several miles much further east where the elevation dropped from Cloudcroft over a much longer distance and there were also some large apple orchards in that area. When the apples got ripe enough to start eating, I always had some with me in the howl car, and I also knew where the orchards were that had apple cider presses in operation. I became the "official" sampler for them, and the first thing I found was that I needed to be very careful how much I sampled in how many places over the period of an afternoon. As you know, different kinds of apples make different tasting cider, so I soon figured out where the kind I liked best were located and confined most of my "testing" to those places.
That experience pretty much ruined me from buying any store bought apple cider. And carrying those fresh crop apples in the howl car also taught me that if apples got loose in the floorboard, one could get up underneath the brake pedal and pretty much totally change a quick braking experience! This in a place where the bottom of the ditch on on side of the pavement was a hundred or more feet below the elevation of the highway!!!! Yikes!!!!
And yes, after I got really well acquainted there, I had the opportunity to sample some of the hard stuff which I would take home with me usually in a pint fruit jar. Couldn't be imbibing whilst on duty, of course! Some of that was not too bad! Didn't take much of it for me though. But that fresh apple cider from the best tasting apples really made an impression on me that I'll never forget! Looks like you and your family have got it down to a science. My family also enjoyed other fruit, usually fresh as well as dried, that was grown in the same area, big red cherries, prune plums, and other good stuff. Needless to say, that stuff all had a salubrious effect on my digestive tract! Had to be careful about that too! We had a nice tasting big apricot tree where we lived for 40 years in eastern NM and we always dried as many as we could get dried when the freeze didn't get the crop. Miss Sheila got to be a good hand at making fried dried apricot pies over the years. Me and the boys never could find a quitting place on those! No doubt yall had a great family time together taking care of those good looking apples! (Great looking bunch of family too, BTW!) Good on y'all!
