North Mystery Trail’s biggest mystery: what season is it?

Dead. Depressing.

My husband’s description of the terrain we just walked through.

North Mystery Trail isn’t a burn-scar moonscape. We’ve seen those, in the Dome Wilderness and the Manzano Mountains.

But if you stand on the east slopes of the Sandia Mountains, as I have been blessed to do a lot this summer, you will see plenty of gray and brown pocking the green. Trees that just ran out of what they needed. Water. Oxygen. Time.

North Mystery Trail has life, lots of it. Red-breasted nuthatches dart through healthy, towering stands of ponderosa. Yellow, orange and black butterflies trail us. A rust-red horny toad comes into and out of focus against the soil beneath.

The universal smell of autumn, dead leaves, greets us too. But it’s midmorning at 8,000 feet in September, and it’s 80 degrees. Everything still living is churning out chlorophyll for all it’s worth.

Below us, in Albuquerque, temperatures climbed above normal virtually every day of August.

The warming of the Southwest is not a blip, one of those unseasonable weather patterns that have happened occasionally since the beginning of time. This is the pattern now.

Under my feet, fossil whorls dot the limestone.

What will remain of this ecosystem in 20 years, or 50, or 100?

The two of us, today, did not get up the back side of the Sandias by public transit or bicycle. So yes. We are part of the problem. We are the problem.

I hope we can also be part of the solution.

My photos and my words from this day don’t really match. I mostly took the green pictures with the views instead of photographing the dead and withered trees and plants. I didn’t know I would write these words until I wrote them. A lesson for me.

Hike length: 5ish miles

Difficulty: moderate

Wildlife spotted/heard: crow, woodpeckers, red-breasted nuthatches, chickadees, butterflies, grasshoppers, horny toads

Trail traffic: light