Behold the male mallard exploding into flight! Beautiful day on the Rio Grande north of Pilar today, with tons o’ ducks (mergansers, goldeneyes, mallards). We also saw Canada geese and a heron. The river is where the action is, all right. And to think that just 800 feet higher and out of the gorge, you’re [...]
Pilar
At Orilla Verde north of Pilar in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument
Another dispatch from the terrible high desert! Behold the poor female mallards, forced to feed and find shelter on the banks of the Rio Grande. The water was running high and clear on Sunday afternoon. So much water going south, where everybody steals it. The ducks kept to the slow water unless they wanted to [...]
If you loved peace and quiet, you’d be here
Another shot from our Sunday trip to Pilar. That’s a bit of the Rio Grande in the foreground. Quite the lovely day it was, and warm, too. As I post this at 2:00 a.m. early Wednesday morning in Llano Quemado, however, heavy wet snow is falling straight down outside! Pilar is nearly a thousand feet [...]
Green leaves by the river, ducks go feeding in the mud
We were planning a trip to Pilar to see the river and hopefully some ducks. “I got gas today,” she said. “Filled it up. Enough to get to Pilar and keep on going, away from this sad town…” I know what she means. The desperate, empty side of living in a tourist town comes to [...]
Looking downstream, Rio Grande at Pilar
That’s what my late Aunt Mary said when I first told her we were planning to move from the family home town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the terrible high desert of New Mexico. That she was at least partly right obscures the more obvious point of her losing a personal representative in [...]
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