On our recent New Mexico vacation we spend just one full day in Santa Fe before returning home. But we saw and did a lot in that one afternoon, and one full day afterward.
The monsoon was going on so every afternoon it would cloud up and rain. Usually just a little bit but on our final evening we had to call the hotel for help so they sent their shuttle. Saved us from getting soaking wet.
Santa Fe is a mixture of the old and the new. I remember as a little kid living in Coyote and mom would take us shopping in Santa Fe. Those art galleries and fancy shops that are there now? They used to be Woolworths, JC Penney’s, Western Auto. Lots of tourists back then as well but Santa Fe was a town where regular people lived.
It’s got some great museums. This is the courtyard at the New Mexico Museum of Art.
And food. I forget just how much I like New Mexican food until I go back. How about some chicken enchiladas with green chili sauce for lunch?
And history? Ancient history and modern history. I saw this little plaque at the back of a store. 109 East Palace was the address where everybody who worked at Los Alamos during the World War I first reported to duty. I read a book about the goings on, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos by Jennet Conant I love reading about the makings of the Atomic Bomb way back when. It was a huge nationwide effort and involved lots of people. My mother worked as a secretary at the Hanford Nuclear Works in Washington which used a reactor to produce plutonium and chemical processing to enrich it. Plutonium from Hanford was used in the first atomic explosion in New Mexico at the Trinity site.
El Santuario de Chimayo (The Sanctuary at Chimayo) is a Catholic Church and shrine located in the little town of Chimayo just a few miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was originally built in 1813, and rebuilt since, and is still an active church. For years it has been a pilgrimage destination, especially during Holy Week, for 300,000 or so people a year, many of whom walk long distances to ask for healing and offer prayers of Thanksgiving.
In a little side room to the church is El Pocito a small hole in the ground that contains sacred dirt that some say heals them from various ailments. I went in the room and saw El Pocito. I didn’t take a photo. It felt disrespectful to do so. I went into the church and the interior is beautiful but they explicitly asked for people not to take photos so of course I did not.
According to tradition, in 1810 the landowner, Don Bernardo de Abeyta experienced a vision of the apparition of Our Lord of Esquipulas in his field while plowing. He petitioned the local priest for permission to build the church in 1813 and replaced it with the current building in 1816. Strangely enough the Abeyta family owned the church and lived off the gifts from pilgrims until 1929 when the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in Santa Fe purchased it from the family and donated it to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.
It is a beautiful building though it does look more ancient and rustic than the St Francis de Asis Church that we visited earlier that day. The tin caps on the spires give it a lot of character. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1970.
The building is surrounded by a large complex containing a visitor center, gift shop, a sizeable outdoor worship area, and several other chapels. You can see they are geared to greet many people. There is no charge for admission and there is plenty of parking. I have never been to this before even though I had heard about it my whole life. It was a nice visit. Very cool visiting a church that has been active for over 200 years.
Through my geocaching hobby I found out about a herd of wild mustangs that formally roamed the American west that are now pastured in a field northeast of Tulsa. So I grabbed my camera and headed out to find the geocache and take photos of the horses.
There is a viewing area right off the road where one can see some of the 2000 horses in the herd on private land. The area is next to a busy turnpike but that doesn’t seem to bother the animals.
They are originally from the western states and the BLM manages the population via adoption and relocation. You can read about the program here.
And here is an interesting blog post about the herd. The horses are feral and will live out their lives on this land. There is plenty of grass for them in the spring and summer and they get hay in the winter. The cost is subsidized by the federal government.
And hey look, there looks to be another herd on the other side of the turnpike!
So I got to see the horses and I found the geocache. I had to wait about 30 minutes because there was a Highway Patrol trooper parked there waiting to catch speeders coming off the turnpike I guess. So when he left I walked up to where he was parked and found the cache quickly. So win/win for that day.
The Saint Francis of Asis Catholic Church is located in the northern New Mexico town of Ranchos de Taos. It was constructed between 1772 and 1816 and is still an active church. It is built of adobe and the church members spend two weeks in June ever year remudding the exterior with a mixture of mud and straw. If you look closely you can see the straw in the exterior walls. It is considered to be Spanish Colonial architecture.
The church has been a favorite subject for years by artists and photographers including Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams. (Check the links for images of the art work.) The artists have focused almost exclusively on the back of the church which has three massive beehive shaped buttresses. I guess that I am not artist because I find the front of the church to be much more interesting.
The interior is gorgeous. The altar looks beautiful. I brightened the image above so you could see but did not advance beyond the closed entrance door. It was almost pitch dark and did not want to disturb anyone who might be in there praying.
Dynamic Auto Painting rendering.
I’ve been seeing this church almost my whole life. Whenever we went through the area when I was a kid we would stop and look. I think it has an almost magical presence. It had been almost 30 years since I last saw it though before our recent trip and I still love it.
In Red River. We enjoyed the Columbine Creek Trail immensely. So I started looking online for another trail that we could do and I found on All-Trails, the Middle Fork Lake Trail. Further from town but about the same distance and elevation except the gravel road to trailhead from the highway is a little over 1 mile long and it says don’t try unless you have a 4WD vehicle. We have a 4WD but I didn’t come out here to get stuck.
So we set out a little later than we planned and got to the gravel road to the trailhead and we came to a water bar in the road. I didn’t want to risk it so we went back to the highway and hiked to the trailhead. That added about 2×1.2 miles or 2.4 total to our excursion. As we hiked it, I saw that I could have gone over it easily with our car. I didn’t feel like hiking 0.4 miles back to the highway so we just kept on walking.
Got to the trailhead and off we went.
It was pretty open for a while. It looked like a fire had gone through years ago or maybe some logging, I don’t know. My Forest Ranger dad would know in a glance what the deal was and he could often tell layers of fires, or disease, and guess at the sequence of all that happened. Me, I can hardly tell one evergreen try from another.
The higher we went, the prettier it got. It looked like a wet year in this stretch of the mountains. Everything was green.
Nice stuff to look at everywhere we went.
Logan was doing pretty good on the hike.
We came to a water crossing just down from a waterfall. We just walked across it. The logs were too slippery and loose for us to trust and water felt good on our feet.
Heather was leading the way and I was bringing up the rear.
Lots of wildflowers
It was almost like somebody had planted them.
All sorts of colors.
As the trail got steeper, we entered a lot of switchbacks. We were at 10,000+ feet and so we each had our own strategy. My wife just charged on ahead. I was doing a rhythm where I was walking until my ears started pounding and then I would stop it stopped. According to my Garmin that put me in a heart rate range of 120 to 128 bpm. Logan just trudged on. It didn’t seem like we would ever get there. I knew from my long distance running days though that if you just keep going, you’ll get there.
And we did. Middle Fork Lake is the prettiest little mountain lake you’ll ever see. Crystal clear and I’m sure ice cold. We rested for a while.
And then started down. (Notice how fast things clouded up.)
We got a mile down the trail and then the rain and lightning started. It got worse and worse, especially the lightning. I personally know two people who have died of lightning. One of them in the mountains of New Mexico so I was a lot more worried about that than the cold rain. We were in the timber though so we kept going. I would have been leery of venturing in the open areas with lightning nearby. And then the hail started. Just a little bit at first but then it started coming down hard. It was maybe pea sized. It got to where it hurt. We stopped for a while and hunkered underneath a scrawny evergreen tree. I didn’t want to get out in the open while it was still hailing because I didn’t know how big the hail stones would get.
So we stayed there hunkered down as the hail peppered us and the wind picked up and got very cold and we were soaking wet. Sorry I wasn’t in the mood for taking photos and the only cameras we had were our cell phones. I thin lightweight long sleeve cover so I put that on even though it was soaking wet also. It seemed that we were hunkered down forever and after a while the hail gradually lessened and eventually stopped so off we went down the mountain.
It was still raining hard and the water was running down the trail about ankle deep. They were nicely constructed trails with water drains but on a switchback the middle drain just dumps the water back on the trail below. But as we continued to go down, the air got warmer and that was nice. When we got to the water crossing below the waterfall that I talked about above, the water was now halfway up to our knees. Nothing to do but go through it. Glad we had hiking sticks.
And then one of the happiest moments of my life; Heather asked me how far we had to go so I took a peek at my watch and I saw it was only 2.3 miles. Dang, I though it was going to be four miles. So yeah, we can do this! And the trail got flatter and wider and the water was less and less. So we made it to the trailhead and walked quickly the remaining 1.2 miles to the car. My main worry was that our car keys being electric wouldn’t work. Heather charged on ahead and by the time we got there she had the car started and warming up.
So we loaded up and took off with the seat heaters on high and the car’s blasting. So I was driving back to our condo and between the cold and the death grip I had on my hiking stick while hunkered down my arms were shaking and I was still freezing. So getting back to the condo and turning on the fireplace and taking showers putting on dry clothes was a wonderful thing.
So we were rookies. I knew better than to go up in the mountains unprepared for bad weather!! I grew up in the mountain west and heard lots about people who did like we did and had to be rescued and in real bad cases bodies were recovered. We took enough water and snacks. We needed rain jackets and waterproof containers for our phones and keys. I’ll be doing some more research before we try this type adventure again.
Shadows of the Vigas and Canales at the St. Francis de Asis Catholic Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.
Vigas are the wooden beams poking through the adobe wall. They are used for supporting the roof. Canales are the roof drains. You can tell that they have been extended for some reason. I’ll have photos of the whole church later.
Continuing our saga of our New Mexico vacation. We got to Red River in the beautiful Sangre de Cristo Mountains and didn’t waste any time hiking the day after we got there. I hadn’t been in the area in 50 years and back then I wasn’t a hiker. So we consulted the redriver.org website and the alltrails app and kind of converged on the nearby Columbine Creek Trail as a good moderate trail. Plus it was only about five miles from town so off we went.
We didn’t see much in the way of critters but there were wildflowers. I had my Merlin App going and it captured the Northern Flicker in a particular section of the trail and not much anywhere else. I caught glimpses of it but not enough to feel comfortable adding it to my “life list.” Those dang birds need to sit still for at least 30 seconds for me to get my camera out, adjust the settings, focus and all that to get a good photo. Those little birds are so rude they way they hop skip and jump all over the place. Just call me Karen and point me to the manager.
Gotta tell you walking through an aspen forest got my feels going. Did that all the time when I was just a kid. Haven’t hardly done it since. I love it. Brings back lots of memories.
And a cold, clear mountain stream. We have lots of water in eastern Oklahoma (and I love it here) but very few clear running streams.
Just one more time on the aspens. Promise!!
The trail crossed Columbine Creek several times. The Forest Service put in these deluxe bridges. I cannot imagine the amount of work to put the bridges in and then keep them maintained.
And I loved the rock cliffs.
I googled the heck of “Quetta” so I don’t know who this person is but they obviously loved the trails.
Here’s two of my hiking team.
We didn’t make it to the promised waterfall at the end of the trail. We were getting low on water and we are flatlanders playing around at over 10,000 feet so we turned around. There will be plenty of waterfalls in our future. So headed back to the trailhead and got there safe and sound. So we got four miles in for the day.
And now a blast from the past.
Our hike reminded me that when I was in high school our family hiked somewhere along the highway in one of the Forest Service campgrounds. I remember dad pointing up to a mountain and saying that there was lots of molybdenum in the rock and that it had been mined there for decades. The mineral is used to harden steel in everything from bulldozer blades to mountain bikes and is very valuable. So I looked it up and molybdenum had indeed been mined there for a long time and the biggest mine, owned by Chevron Mining, was an open pit mine right across the road from the campground where our trailhead was. I got on google maps and the mine looks a lot worse than it looks from the road. It is a huge open pit mine.
Chevron shut the mine down in 2014 and settled with the State and the Feds for over $140 million in cleanup costs from the damage of runoff from the mine into the Red River. Chevron is still cleaning it up and is still helping the downstream village of Questa deal with transitioning their economy from mining to something else. Mining is necessary for our modern life but cleaning it up is an expensive, lengthy process. I think they are pretty close to completing the project.
Hey I apologize for digressing but I found the mine fascinating and was amazed at how much damage it caused to the surrounding area.
We decided to take a last minute vacation to New Mexico. Spend a few days at Red River, up in the moutains and then go spend some time in Santa Fe. It has been a long time since we have escaped to the moutains.
Of course we had to drive the endless miles through Oklahoma to the mountains. Including endless waiting for trains where one literally could not see the end of the train!!
But hey we got there, gasping at the 8750 ft elevation but thrilled at the low temperatures. We have been getting baked in Oklahoma lately so the low temps and humidity were welcome.
The food and drink there were not bad.
The Red River winds through town. It is not a big river but the ducks like it. The trout did as well. People were pulling them out pretty regularly. Apparently the city has spent a bunch of money over the years creating “fish parks” narrowing the channel, planting trees and shrubs on the banks. The fish have responded. They like it.
It makes for a chill vibe. People are low key and friendly.
The city has several public fishing ponds.
One day when the family was resting I went venturing for a geocache close to where we were staying.
It was located in a beautiful mountain cemetery right close to town.
