It’s evergreen (and heavy machinery) season on Oso Corredor Trail

This trail smells like the inside of a jar of apple-cedarwood moonshine.

I know this because we recently received one of those from a friend. (It tastes as good as it sounds.)

We showed up at Oso Corredor Trail in the Sandias to find a serious forest-thinning operation taking place. Heavy equipment buzzed just beyond the trail, reducing swaths of trees to splinters. I stuck my nose in the deep red heart of a masticated cedar trunk.

We left the heavy machinery behind as we climbed into the spruce-fir zone. We heard a couple of rumbles of thunder, but the sun stayed strong.

My husband lightly brushed the trunk of a spruce tree and sap shot onto his hand. The sap smelled exactly like tangerines and made us both crave an IPA.

A cicada landed on his sappy hand and hitched a ride for almost the entire hike.

The climb up the trail from a popular picnic area had challenged me, but as the trail leveled out near the top, I started to feel like I could hike forever.

This is not a feeling I get often, and when we reached the junction with Tree Spring trail, I was tempted to keep going.

But we’d already hiked four miles with four to go back, and I wanted to explore an electric-green meadow we’d just passed. When we reached it, we found huge stands of wild rose. We’d seen wild rose in full bloom a week earlier on a trail at 1,500 feet lower elevation, but this had yet to bud.

As we descended, clouds moved over, darkened, and thunder rumbled again. The grass looked even greener and the wildflowers pulsed brighter under the dark sky.

Raindrops polka-dotted the limestone under our feet. As they came faster, my husband offered me a poncho. I declined, thinking the tree cover would keep me mostly dry for the hike’s final mile and a half.

10 minutes later, we descended the side of a steep ridge in a dark, driving rain, ice-cold hail pellets pelting us. Thunder boomed, and a flash of lightning blinked nearby. I was soaked and cold, longing for the dry clothes in my pack. I decided I would put them on in the restroom at the trailhead.

But the rain slowly lessened. By the time we reached Bill Spring Trail, an 0.75-mile path that would take us back to the parking lot, the sun returned to light a sparkling-wet canyon. My clothes were already mostly dry.

We passed a family who had heard the heavy machinery. My husband told them how we’d seen it rip cedars out of the ground. Their two little boys’ eyes lit up.

Both man and nature provide quite an experience on Oso Corredor Trail right now.

Hike length: 8+ miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: moderate

Wildlife spotted: crow, robins, lizard, butterflies galore, cicadas galore, Abert’s squirrel, hummingbird