Sandstone and snowmelt at San Ysidro Trials Area

I place my feet carefully in the thin crescent of stone at the base of a narrow slot canyon.

The rock slopes down, deposits me on a landing. Red sediment ripples over the sandstone, shows the path water took down this canyon days ago. Everything around us curves.

Water still rests in the stone. Some of the pools stretch several feet across. We skirt some, step through others on rocks.

After half a mile, we reach a pool too wide to safely cross. We backtrack, covering the same ground in minutes that had taken us a half hour as we explored every detail.

We climb out of the canyon where we climbed in, a series of rock ledges guiding our way up.

On the rim above, the land is corrugated, tan rock oxidized, rust and brown and black. It perfectly suits what this place, the San Ysidro Trials Area, is primarily used for – motorcycle trials, bikes ripping turns and tricks on the rock. Yet we’ve never seen a bike here, except in the parking lot, and hardly any other hikers.

We gaze into the canyon’s womb far below. We see more and bigger pools. The storm that grazed the Jemez and Sierra Nacimiento mountains with fresh snow this week left its mark here too.

The floor of the canyon begins to rise, the rim to descend.

Where the rock ends, we follow a motorcycle path across red and purple dirt, occasionally marked with white, like chalk.

The meadow leads us to another wide swath of wavy rock, a few small pools dotting the sandstone. We look behind us at the Sandia Mountains. In Albuquerque they appear monolithic. From this angle, craggy and snow-covered, they look more like pictures of the Alps.

We found this strange and incredible loop hike in Stephen Ausherman’s “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque.” This was our third try at it.

The first time, we accidentally did the whole thing backward and missed the slot canyon entirely, though we didn’t realize it. The wide swath of wavy rock itself is pretty rad, and we thought its little pools were the ones described in the book.

The second time, we went down the wrong wash entirely.

Today, we managed to find what we didn’t even know we’d been missing.

Hike length: 6.6 miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: none

Wildlife spotted: lizards, blue and black moth