One of the things Heather and I did during out stay in Santa Fe last month was go to The Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe. We’ve seen a lot of O’Keefe’s art over the years but they had a lot of things that were different from what we were used to. (And check the link, they have over 1000 works of art by O’Keefe, over 800 photographs, and other pieces of art from people inside O’Keefe’s circle.)
Black Cross with Red Sky
In the Patio, VIII
Red Hills and Sky
Turns out that O’Keefe was a photographer as well. From what I understand she used a camera to help her remember scenes that she was going to paint later. She was quite prolific artist.
I loved this photo of her cooking, she looks very open and friendly. She didn’t show this side of herself much.
I highly recommend the museum if you happen to be in town.
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.
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.
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.
R to L, my wife Heather, Me, and son Logan. Photo by tour guide with my phone.
I have been AWOL from blogging for the last week or so. Sorry about that, we went on vacation to the mountains of northern New Mexico. One day we went on a jeep tour that included a stop at a played out gold mine and went into the mine a little bit as the guide explained the multilayered history of mining in the area starting with the Native Americans to the conquering Spaniards, to the depression era when white collar types would try their hand at it. Then he handed out mining pans and a shovel and we tried our hand at it. Talk about dreary work for nothing much. Turns out if there are kids on the outing the guide salts the tailings with gold painted pebbles. We were too old for that. But it was fun to find out how the work was done.
Here is the old mine, sitting about maybe ten feet above the road and the opening is tall enough to stand in. We climbed in and went in maybe fifteen feet. The guide went further in and showed us the other shafts that took off. Most of them collapsed but a few still open. Some of them were only big enough for a person to crawl through on their belly. (That thought chills me.) He said they tied ropes to the miner’s feet so they could pull them out at the end of their shift.
As my late grandmother told me once. “You can have the good old days, there was nothing good about them.”
During some free time that I had in September attending my 50th high school reunion in Albuquerque I made my way down to the Rio Grande River bosque to visit the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park. A bosque is the woodlands and land adjacent to riparian streams and rivers. I’ve only heard the term used in New Mexico. Bosque’s are rich in wildlife and plants and after being neglected for years are now being preserved and restored.
I lived in Albuquerque from 1971 until I graduated from college in 1977. The whole time I lived there I never visited the bosque. Part of the reason is geography. I lived in the northeast heights where it seemed most other so called Anglos lived. The north and south valley of the Rio Grande river was considered kind of rough territory to visit. It all seems kind of ridiculous to me now and I feel bad about missing a great opportunity.
I went to do some hiking a little bit of geocaching and mainly just explore and see what was there. There were several serious bird watchers in the park. You know, they have binoculars, notebooks, and cameras with big lens and they have infinite patience staying in one place for a long time before moving on. Hey I admire them but I am not temperamentally suited for such things. I like moving.
I found me a tiny little nanocache. There were others out there but they were off trail quite a ways and there all sorts of signs asking people to stay on the trails. I didn’t want to be “that guy.”
One could tell that they had used fire or other vegetation clearing method to open up the woods.
These big metal things are Jack Jetties or Kellen Jetties. The Corps of Engineers placed tens of thousands of these things all up and down the river. They are meant to stabilize the banks and keep the river in its channel. They, along with some dams, worked too well. The river never flooded into its floodplain rejuvenating the soil and drowning out invasive species. The Corps has removed many of the jetties and that has heled the bosque revive.
A big bird watching area is this pond right by the visitor center. They had a large hummingbird feeder that rotated over the pond and I’ve never seen so many hummingbirds. I couldn’t get a good angle on the hummingbirds but you can see the Sandia Mountains off far away. You can see them from all parts of town.
My walk took me right by the Rio Grande River a couple times. Here the river is on the far side of this “beach.”
And here, the river is right by the bank.
So I walked and moseyed about three miles and enjoyed myself very much. The park integrates with an extensive walking/biking trail that goes along the river for miles and connects several attractions. I would sure like to return and explore the area some more.
