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This is somewhere near the bottom of the Rio Grande Gorge, maybe twenty yards above and fifty in a straight line from the river. The top of the cliff is 800 feet above.

The scene is more unusual than you might think. The humongous boulders, for example, but especially the really sturdy sagebrush and a few deciduous trees. It’s obviously wetter than on the mesa. What precipitation that does fall gets funneled into the gorge by the cliffs on either side, and of course there is the river. When we were there today, it was running high and strong. There must be a lot of melting snow in the San Juan Mountains. I wonder how long that will last?

Walking back from this, we saw the wildest thing. Small flocks of ducks were wheeling back and forth across the gorge. They’d glide down to the river like they were going to land and then swoop up again or change direction. Canada geese flew overhead and honked. All at once another flock of ducks went by, close this time. Whatever were they doing, I thought, and then we saw the eagle giving chase! An immature bald eagle or a golden, mostly blackish-brown, with a dark head and a big ol’ eagle beak, oh yeah. It broke off pursuit at that point and flew right past us.

If I hadn’t already known it was an eagle, I’d have nailed it by the steady pump-pump-pump of its powerful wings. An eagle doesn’t mess around. You see that and you just know.

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I hiked a different trail this afternoon, imagine that. We found a real gem in the Rio Grande Gorge, but I’m not naming it here until I can check something out. You’ll see why.

Those rocks! I don’t know what they are, but igneous for sure: lava, basalt, granite? There’s a place with great honking piles of them lying around like the crumbled walls of an ancient city; here and there immense solitary boulders dominate the view. High above it all are towering cliffs pockmarked with caves. The vibes in this general area are remarkable. I felt a deep, beneficent presence several times along the trail.

The gorge is such an unusual environment anyway, being sheltered from the wind and wild and having the water. You don’t see the weather coming from ninety miles away like you do up top, but there are caves and holes and hot springs to lead you to the underworld. Humans have been exploring there for thousands of years: hunting, fishing, hiding, holding ceremonies… Maybe that old spiritual spoor is what I noticed. No city in the world has lasted longer than a miniscule fraction of the lifetime of the gorge, yet some version of our kind has always known this place, at least once it cooled off.

Speaking of the underworld (oh those holes), at one point while editing the featured photograph for this post, I accidentally enlarged it a little bit and noticed something that got me all excited at first: “Ribs, by God! Must be a skeleton in there!” Of course, when I blew it up even larger and posted the image below, I saw something else.

I have to go back, of course. After that, I’ll tell you where that is, if no one blabs it in the comments. Ain’t no ribs, but a) I’m only 99 percent sure, and b) there still could be something in there. If I had the nerve to go far enough in, I’m sure there would be. It might even be alive!

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Here he is again! I met him the other day for the third time on the Rift Valley Trail at Taos Valley Overlook. This time we chatted and shook hands. Maybe the next time, we’ll actually exchange names.

This is the man who famously told me at our first meeting after I mentioned my age, “You’re just a boy”, and then revealed that he was eighty-two. “Just keep walking, you’ll get there,” he said, adding that his greatest accomplishment was remaining vertical. Our latest encounter went something like this:

Cowboy: “Well, hello! Good to see you again!”

Me: “Hi! Yeah, same here.”

Cowboy: “Looks like we have the place all to ourselves today.”

Me: “Oh yeah. Just the way I like it!”

Cowboy: “You and me both, pardner. But I don’t mind seeing you out here!”

And then we had a little talk about horses, as if I know anything about horses. But I know more now than before, including the fact that this particular horse had a black mane and tail before he turned three, and that “roanies” change color throughout their lives.

He must have taken a different route back. When I returned to the parking lot at the trailhead, the only truck and horse trailer combo I’d seen before I started was still there, meaning it was his. I’ve seen it out there before without running into him—there are 2,581 acres, after all—and I always thought it was an older guy’s rig: maybe a ’90 or ’91 F-150, with a crew cab and deep metallic blue paint, pulling what looks like a retro trailer, all of this immaculate and very shiny.

Young guys tend not to take care of old trucks. Just consider my poor ’87, all beat-up and filthy but still rolling down the road. (Remember, he said I was a boy!)

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Oh, what a day. Windy and wild! You could see and feel the cold air and moisture blowing down from Colorado. A hundred miles away in the direction you’re looking (WNW), the forecast was for one to two feet of wet snow.

I love living at seven thousand feet. There’s something so healthy about it. All my organs are awake! (Well, most of them.)

“Jesus, look how high we are!”
“More hemoglobin! Shit!”

Whenever we come down from the mountains, which is almost never, the first thing I notice is how heavy the air is. I keep expecting people to complain. It’s like the stuff they breathe is crushing them and no one notices, but I do. If it happens to be humid, so much the worse. There’s a palpable lift coming back to high altitude. (Duh.) I feel wired. Could just be the body freaking out at being stuck back in the clouds. No matter, I like it. It fills me with a strange excitement, being closer to the sky.

A little over a year ago, I flew to Maine to see what I’d inherited from my aunt’s house. On my last afternoon there, I drove down to the ocean. It had easily been twenty years since I’d put my feet in the Great Holy Salt Water that covers the Earth. The blue-green surf was mesmerizing. The ocean itself was so big, slowly heaving and sighing with a life all its own, rising and falling and stretching forever. The primal smells. The booming waves. The hissing sand.

Gave me a thrill, it did. Part of me wanted to buy my aunt’s house just to be forty-five minutes away from all that. The only problem was that Maine lay in between, and there were people in it.

Also, the air was heavy as rocks.

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