Disclaimer: I may have hallucinated this entire hike

The sky’s so blue it’s pulsing.

Giant cotton-candy clouds unfurl above us. One cloud is a dragon crossed with a seahorse. It spins off wisps that float and disappear. A hole opens in the cloud, swirls, then closes again. Two birds fly just below the cloud, so high they are specks.

Gradually, I notice my surroundings other than this cloud. A small white butterfly dances around wildflowers growing out of red and beige rock walls. A breeze brushes my skin. I’m almost chilly. One hour ago, that was a feeling I thought I’d never have again.

We’ve been lying on rocks staring at this cloud for 30 minutes.

What is this trip we’re on?

***

This was a “Clerks” hike: “I’m not even supposed to BE here today!”

We were headed to hike in the San Pedro Mountains for the first time, a route out of Stephen Ausherman’s incomparable “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque.”

But the dirt road to the hike was chained and padlocked.

We were less than a quarter-mile from the hike’s start, and it was our understanding that it was on public land, but we didn’t want to cross the padlocker, who clearly thought otherwise.

The only other hike we knew of in the area: Golden Open Space, an oasis in the Sandoval County hills owned by the City of Albuquerque, also a route we found in Ausherman’s book.

So we headed up lovely, twisty La Madera Road (even its name is glorious), notching three wrong turns even though we’d already been there.

We arrived at the open space just as some cyclists were leaving. They were the last souls we saw.

We followed a loop to an overlook with killer views of the Sandia, Ortiz and San Pedro Mountains. We could see the road we’d just driven in search of the San Pedro hike. The forested hills below us glowed brick red. A cottontail noticed us and bounded for cover, and a bluejay swept by.

At least four kinds of yellow wildflowers covered the ground, and some looked almost chartreuse in the bright sun. We noticed yellow daisy-like flowers sprouting from the ground beneath the branches of twisty cedar trees.

We set off for a shelter cave at the end of the loop. It takes some scrambling to get there, and though I’d done it before, I couldn’t look down.

As cool as caves are to look at, they freak me out, because creatures live in them. I hadn’t gone inside the cave on our last visit. But that was before I had a hiking blog. People with hiking blogs don’t pass up the opportunity to take pictures in caves. So I climbed in.

I liked it, actually. I could see the whole cave; I had room to stand up in its mouth, though it quickly tapered to a couple of feet high behind me.

When I climbed down, I realized I was roasting like a chicken kabob.

The upper loop of this hike has no shade, and the lower loop doesn’t have much. It was a glorious day, about 76 degrees, but 76 degrees with the sun high in the sky and no shade at 7,000 feet is blistering. I reapplied sunscreen, we headed for the lower loop and left the trail for an arroyo in search of a little canyon shade. The arroyo quickly met a larger one, and my husband built a cairn so we’d recognize where the little arroyo that would lead us back to the trail branched off.

The big arroyo was pretty sunny. It was also pretty trippy.

Corrugated red rocks undulated beneath our feet. Stepped layers of rock stretched down one side of the arroyo. Far above, the shelter cave we’d climbed into shimmered.

At the end of the arroyo, where it met another, came cloudland. When I got up from our cloud hallucination to get a peek at the next arroyo, my husband saw a tarantula hawk walking along the rocks.

That next arroyo was a rock garden, the walls on each side twice as high as the channel we’d just been in.

I was too tired to explore it today.

But I can’t wait to see what kind of trip awaits us there.

Hike length: 5 miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: nope

Wildlife spotted: blue jay, cottontail, tarantula hawk, dead rat in arroyo, violet gray swallow, finch