MY GOD, you didn’t bring them with you, did you? »Buy This Photo!«
No, that is not a bighorn sheep, but Callie the Wonder Cat will have to do. The reason is that when it comes to my regular hiking near the gorge, unless the clouds are interesting or I have an intuition, I usually travel light like I did Tuesday morning and leave my camera at home. This is where an iPhone would be handy, since I’d always carry that. After you read this, you may wonder how insane it is that I don’t have one yet.
I drove out to walk—ten minutes from the house—and the trailhead parking lot was empty. Now, this is what you want: it meant I could do my four miles and never see a soul. All that sunlight, all those vistas, all that cold clean air, all that privacy and quiet. Most people never get to experience anything like this, not out in the open with a ninety-mile view. You can hear and see your thoughts and other things.
The first thing I saw this time was what looked like fresh sheep poop fifty steps from the parking lot. As if I’d ever seen any before. It couldn’t be though, could it, I thought, so close to the highway? But maybe that was right. Near the end of my outward bound leg about two miles down the trail, I stumbled into dozens of bighorn tracks, clear as anything in a stretch of half-dried mud. Around the next bend, I saw their big white butts: just below the trail, three bighorn rams were grazing in the fresh green grass at the bottom of a wide arroyo!
They were close enough that I could hear them eating. They heard me, too, of course, and turned to check me out. These were large ones, strong and fearless. After a long hard stare, they lowered their heads and returned to grazing. I stood as quietly as I could until they’d moved on out of sight behind some trees, then followed them for fifty yards until a clearing opened up. We were all together again, this time even closer—I could have bounced a rock off the nearest one’s head! Another long hard stare, and they went back to breakfast. I couldn’t believe they tolerated me so well, and this part of the encounter was a long one. Every time I made a sound by shifting my position, we did the eye-lock thing again. By then I wasn’t sorry that I didn’t have a camera. Pictures are for showing to other people later, being there is for letting it soak into your brain. I did, until I had to slip away.
They watched me go and never ran.
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Tags:
bighorns,
hiking,
Rio Grande Gorge,
Taos Valley Overlook
No houses up there, ain’t it grand? »Buy This Photo!«
Crazy energy yesterday morning, what with the late night snow that mostly missed us and the rolling clouds shot through with sun. It was cold, too. Springtime in the Rockies, hoo boy. How wild is it to have a mountainside like this next door? You can see exactly where the freezing was!
I love this stuff. Weather lessons all the time, in a land where “pay attention” means you might survive. Almost like it was planned.
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Tags:
Llano Quemado,
mountains,
snow,
weather
More snow on the mountain now means more water in the summer streams »Buy This Photo!«
We don’t mess around here in northern New Mexico. If this timezone wasn’t already called “Mountain Time,” we’d have to change it. I took this telephoto shot of Taos Mountain, officially known as Pueblo Peak (which no one calls it), around 7:30 a.m. MDT from just a few steps outside the front door. The elevation at the summit is 12,305 ft. Where I was standing is about 7,058 ft. I love high altitude. I wish it were warmer here, but I guess something had to go.
Speaking of something having to go, the years of struggle are at an end. Public struggle, anyway. I ain’t perfect, but I am done whining about it. Having conveniently outlived them all, there’s no one left to blame. And just when I was about to throw Taos and New Mexico away, after cursing my location more times than I can count for whatever ailed me, a practice I’ve carried out for my entire adult life, it seems that I’m exactly where I want to be for now and all I want to do is write. The moment is a slow pitch over the plate. There’s nowhere left to run, in any case. That yearning is mostly about avoiding the heavy lifting we eternal boys just never learn.
In a previous version of this post, I gave the erroneous impression that I was thinking of shutting down the blog. That will never happen, though, so please relax. I’m relaxing, too, which is why I deleted the rest I bitched about. It’s embarrassing when you catch yourself doing exactly what you said you wouldn’t, but that’s the price of just a little bit of self-awareness. Well worth it! Carry on, and let’s see what happens next.
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Tags:
New Mexico,
Taos Mountain,
writing life
April 26, 2015 7:58 PM
by JHF
in
Taos
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Three days later: rain, sleet, and snow! »Buy This Photo!«
Behold the gorge! Behold the rift valley! Behold the extinct volcanoes! Behold the shadowy sage! Behold what must be the five hundredth photo I’ve shot and posted of this exact same view! Behold, behold! Each one is different, though, that’s the amazing thing. This time of year, I’m always surprised to cast my gaze across the chasm of the Rio Grande Gorge and see the Terrible High Desert™ tinged in green.
It’s also trying to rain in this one. Those fuzzy blue-gray streaks coming down from that cloud are rain, just not the kind that makes it to the ground. The technical term is “virga,” which makes sense if you think about it. All fired up and nowhere to go. Unconsummated rain! While it won’t get you wet, the evaporating water chills the surrounding air, which plunges to the ground creating sudden massive bursts of wind called virga bombs. These can appear seemingly out of nowhere and wreck the patio if you have one. Those of you who don’t will want to count the goats when things calm down.
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April 24, 2015 12:03 PM
by JHF
in
Adventure
{ }
Take away the freeways, something happens »Buy This Photo!«
I was walking along this escarpment a couple of days ago. The wind was strong and blowing from the west, hitting the cliff below straight on, blasting an updraft over the top. Moments before I took this photo, a pair of turkey vultures swooped up from the arroyo below, riding on the current! It was like they just shot out of the ground, because I hadn’t seen them flying below. At that point, they were very close to me for an instant but went on to fly an immense circle almost to the edge of the gorge, then dropped back down, flew back up the arroyo, and rode the updraft over the cliff again at almost the same spot! It was quite a thing to see, the way they covered so much space from such a height without ever flapping their wings.
Today I was at a different but not dissimilar location, with contact of a sort in mind. You could think of this as relaxation into melding with the chthonic spirits, but who the hell am I to be so arrogant? Let’s just say I stood there emptying my mind as best I could, and then I felt this density and asked, what wants expression? (Real mystical shaman voodoo shit!)
At that exact moment I heard a soft, deep buzzing. I was standing perfectly still, facing the sun, with my eyes partially closed. All I could think of was a large bee or wasp. The buzzing seemed to come from in front of my head, above the brim of my cap, before circling once so close that I could feel a tell-tale vibrating puff of air against my ear: a hummingbird, by God! Not that I actually saw it, but with experience, you know. Now look at that photo again: see any flowers? There are however bright red colors in the University of New Mexico Lobos logo on the front of my hat! All right, then.
It all makes perfect sense to me, my question and the rest—one needs to grok the symbolism of a hummingbird—but then I’m lost to preachers and the grid. There seems to be assistance in the greater scheme of things, at any rate. Go forth and raise some hell.
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Tags:
hummingbird,
Rio Grande Gorge,
Taos Valley Overlook,
vultures
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