Hello Everyone! It’s been another amazing week out here in New Mexico and I can’t wait to tell you about it, but I’m going to start out this week with my most exciting news. As most of you know, I will be going back to my regular gig as an overland tour guide this summer. I’ll be working for a company called Incredible Adventures which is currently being run by my last two managers from my old company. I got a call from one of them yesterday with some thoughts on my start-up tour and I will be heading to Hawaii next month. Of all the places I thought I might go this summer, Hawaii was not on my list and I am so excited for this opportunity. It will be in the midst of my time in Arizona, but I will fly out and then back and be able to finish up my time there before heading on to San Francisco to begin my season in earnest. I am definitely looking forward to walking barefoot on a white sand beach and swimming in beautiful turquoise water. So with mai tais and sea turtles dancing in my head, let me tell you about my exciting week here in New Mexico.
When I left you last week, I was planning on heading to a place called Meow Wolf the following morning. Meow Wolf was an incredible experience which is really hard to explain. It’s essentially a big funhouse, full of fascinating and beautiful art installations. You enter it through the front door of a Victorian house and then you choose your own adventure from there. You can go through the fireplace into an ice cave with a mammoth skeleton which you can play like a xylophone. You can go through the refrigerator which takes you to a strange vacationland. You can go through the bookcase and come out in a circus-like room. You end up in treehouses and lighthouses and flying buses. It really is quite a place to experience and I was there for probably three hours and continued finding new rooms and passages right up until the end, and I’m sure I missed some along the way. It was weird and wonderful and I would definitely recommend it if you are ever in Santa Fe (or Denver or Las Vegas).
My Thursday afternoon was definitely one of ups and downs. I got a call from my dad telling me he had fallen and broken his ankle. He’ll be okay and is in a recovery facility, but I worry about some of these places and what floats around in them with Covid only being one such worry. On the flip-side, I got a nice email telling me one of my photos has been accepted to be published in a book of hiking trails from National Geographic called 100 Trails, 5000 Ideas. As a photographer, National Geographic is obviously one of the biggest names in the industry and while it will be a small photo in a big book, I’m still very happy to be included. In the afternoon I headed over to visit the Montezuma Masonic Lodge, where the gentleman I met in Taos told me I could find Kit Carson’s rifle. I met several of the Masons who were a part of the Lodge when I walked in, and they were incredibly warm and welcoming. The Secretary, Don, told me the whole story of the rifle and how Kit himself had instructed that it be hand delivered to the Lodge upon his death. It was, and they’ve been caring for it ever since. I had to put on a pair of gloves to hold it, but it was amazing to have this piece of history in my hands. I’m very grateful to the gentlemen of the Montezuma Lodge for their hospitality and all of the fascinating stories they shared with me while I was there. I decided to celebrate the day with a few beers at La Fonda, a wonderful must-see hotel right off the central Plaza in downtown Santa Fe. Mark has been bartending at La Fonda for years and it’s always a pleasure to stop in and say hello and have a drink in historic surroundings. From there, I said goodbye to Santa Fe and headed up the highway to the Buffalo Thunder casino for the night.
I started my day on Friday at Bandelier National Monument, not far up the road. Due to its proximity to Santa Fe it’s a busy park and it was fairly crowded when I was there, but there were some great old ruins to poke around at the base of some beautiful cliffs. When I had had my fill of the ruins, I had some lunch and then set off up the other side of the canyon on the Frijoles Rim Trail. It was a wonderful and beautiful trail and, in contrast to the valley, I didn’t see a single person along the whole hike. The trail took me up to the top of the canyon and along its rim for a mile or so and there were wonderful views down the canyon and off to the mountains in the distance. When I made it back to my van, we were off and running to Los Alamos to have a short look around Manhattan Project National Historical Park before it closed. I had been to another section of this park several years ago in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where they had enriched the uranium which was then transported to Los Alamos and built into the atomic bombs. They tested their first bomb at the Trinity Site down near what is now White Sands National Park, which I drove past about a month ago. I have incredibly mixed feelings about nuclear weapons, as I’m sure we all do (or should), and I’ve also spent time in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m not going to dive too deep into all of that, though, and I will leave it by saying that I’m glad we figured it out before the Nazis did, but I wish we had never used it. Los Alamos is a clean and well-organized city and I met people there who were third generation engineers at the labs there. I poked around J. Robert Oppenheimer’s house, which is being renovated by the town for interpretation, and around the science museum as well. I decided to go to a little Korean restaurant for some noodles and while the owners were so welcoming and friendly, their food was bland by any standards. I washed the non-taste out of my mouth with a well-named Hoppenheimer IPA at Bathtub Row Brewing (named after the nearby Bathtub Row, the only houses in town with bathtubs in the 1940s, which housed the top scientists, including Oppenheimer). I spent the night in their quiet town parking lot by the lake.
I was up and out early on Saturday and made a beeline for the Valles Caldera National Preserve. This is one of the newest additions to the National Park System and is located inside a massive volcanic caldera. They only let a small number of cars into the Preserve each day and I got pass #2 when I arrived. The trail they recommended quickly became too snow-covered to navigate, so I veered off to the right and ended up on a beautiful old fire road behind the small row of historic cabins, now occupied by park service personnel. I was shocked to see two other hikers on the trail (they must have been pass #1), but mostly I had the place to myself and I loved it. I even bought a T-shirt which is an honor I reserve for my very favorite national parks (and which makes up the majority of my wardrobe). Leaving the caldera, I continued down New Mexico Route 4, which is one of the most scenic roads in the state and winds through some spectacular scenery as it follows several creeks and streams through the mountains. I stopped at the impressive Soda Butte Dam and then headed on to Jemez State Historic Site. This site is another example of an older Puebloan site and a Spanish mission church added much later. Both are in ruins now, and while I’ve now seen quite a few such sites, it was still interesting to see. From there, I stopped in the historic town of Jemez Springs for a beer at Los Ojos Saloon, which looks like it hasn’t changed much since it opened in 1947. It was a nice stop, but I wanted to make it to Albuquerque before dark so I wasn’t there long. I got to Albuquerque around 7, stopped and got some Japanese curry for dinner at O Ramen and then headed downtown for some live music at Boots and Bourbon. While I love exploring new places, sometimes it’s nice to go back to somewhere I’ve come to know – it’s like getting a warm hug from the world. It was a fun night.
Sunday morning I headed back to the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center to see another dance performance by the young people from Zuni Pueblo. This was a different group than I had seen on my first visit a few weeks ago, and they did a wonderful job and I once again felt very privileged to be there. When they finished their performance, I stayed for lunch at the restaurant and had some buffalo cabbage stew and a Tiwa taco on frybread which was delicious. The day had turned into one of those perfect spring days which only come a few times a year, so I decided to scrap my plans for the rest of the day and find a nice place to sit outside and enjoy it. I ended up at the wonderful Bow and Arrow Brewery, sipping their delightful farmhouse ale and reading my book on the patio until the sun went down. I had reservations for a hot-air balloon ride in the morning, though, so I called it an early night soon thereafter.
Sadly, the winds came up strong overnight and my balloon ride was cancelled and with severe wind in the forecast for the next few days, I decided to move on and save it for another day. I did stop in at Sadie’s, a beloved Albuquerque institution, for lunch and their reputation is definitely well-deserved. Their lunch portion was so big that I had a full meal left over for dinner, and it was pretty tasty too with probably my favorite chili relleno in the state. Then I headed over to Costco for a bit and that’s where I got the call about Hawaii. I got a bit of a later start than I had hoped for, but eventually made my way out of town headed west. I stopped for a few photos in Grants, an old town on Historic Route 66, and then headed on to El Morro National Monument for the night. I got there just before their visitors’ center was closing, watched the park film and then found a nice spot in their campground where I sipped a Kona beer and listened to Hawaiian music until the sun went down. Just before it did, a herd of elk wandered through my camp. I haven’t seen elk in years and they made me incredibly happy.
In the morning, I got back to the visitors’ center as soon as they opened and headed out on the Inscription Rock Trail. El Morro is Spanish for “The Headland” and refers to an outcropping of rock which has guided travelers in the area since the very beginnings of European penetration into the interior. Originally a Puebloan town remembered as Atsinna, the cliff harbors a natural dam which held rain water and was a steady source of water in an area where water is scarce. It was that water source which brought later travelers through, many of whom saw the Indian petroglyphs in the sandstone and decided to carve their own names as well. Juan de Oñate, New Mexico’s first Spanish governor, carved his name on the rock on his second visit in 1605. After the Pueblo revolt against Spanish rule, Juan de Vargas led the next Spanish conquest into the area, and he too left his name on the rock. Other Spaniards left inscriptions as well, and when Americans starting venturing into the region, they continued the tradition. The Beale Expedition left their mark when they passed through on their mission to test whether camels were suitable as military work animals in the American desert. While these inscriptions are, at their most basic, graffiti, they’re also a fascinating historical record of who passed by and when. Now that I know more about New Mexican history than I did the last time I was there 7 years ago, it was even more fascinating. It was super windy on the trail, but I made it up to the top as well to see the remains of the old Puebloan town of Atsinna before heading on down the road to Gallup. Gallup is another old Route 66 town (which I’m sure you know from the song), and is a pretty big town by New Mexico standards. I’m looking forward to wandering around tonight and taking some photos downtown.
I’m going to finish this post up a day early this week because tomorrow I am headed out to the Bisti-De-Na-Zin Wilderness and may not get a chance to add to the story before my newsletter goes out Thursday morning. After hopefully a nice long hike in the wilderness, I will head on to Farmington where I will spend a couple of days catching up on some things and winding up my time in New Mexico. I hope to be pushing into Arizona by the weekend. I’m going to be working my way down the east side of the state and spending my first few days in very familiar territory on the Navajo Reservation. I’ve probably spent a collective 6 months with the Navajo in my life and have some very old and dear friends on the reservation (who can be tough to track down, but you never know). I’ve spent a lot of time in Arizona in my life, but I’m usually breezing through here and there and I’m very much looking forward to slowing down and taking a closer look. Any tips or pointers are definitely welcome – please send me a message or drop a comment below. As usual, I have no idea where I’ll be at this time next week, but I will definitely be starting my Arizona adventure. I hope you’ll come back and see what I have gotten into. And if you find yourself with one of those perfect spring days in the weeks to come (or perfect autumn days for my friends in the Southern Hemisphere), I hope you will carve out the time to enjoy it while you can. Have a great week out there and I’ll see you right back here, same time next week. Thank you for reading.
-Mike