March 2020 – Woman Seeks Elevation

March 22, 2020March 22, 2020

Angry Raisin seeks space at Golden Open Space: A social distancing story

Ten miles off Highway 14, down a long, narrow, twisty road, a full hour’s drive from Albuquerque, remote land beckons.

My little car crests a hill above the parking lot. It has at least 10 cars in it.

I burst out laughing.

I’ve been down La Madera Road to Golden Open Space in the East Mountains at least five times. Four of those times we saw no other humans.

But every human in the world right now has the same need: to get the hell out of the house.

Last night, one week into social distancing, I flung a still-whirring electric toothbrush against the wall. It felt good, but nothing broke, so I went outside and hurled a commemorative glass from my college’s homecoming against the side of the house.

The sound of glass breaking brought enough catharsis that I decided I could get through one more night in my house.

Yesterday I saw a tweet: Your quarantine name is how you feel right now plus the last thing you ate from the cupboard.

I am Angry Raisin, in desperate need of a safely socially distant distraction.

My hiking and life partner will not be traveling long distances on his left foot for a while. So I headed out for a solo hike at Golden Open Space, which turned out far from solo.

One moment I’m marveling at the fresh snow coating the Sandia Peak ski runs a few miles away.

The next I’m calculating how I will stay six feet away from all these people and their dogs. Thinking I should go much farther afield next weekend, farther than I should go alone, and who can I invite to go with me?

I drop into rust-red hills. Step six feet off the trail to let a man and his dog pass. Notice I’m right above the magical red-and-blue mystery arroyo. Clamber down, thinking I’ll shortcut to where the trail crosses the arroyo.

But that could take all day, as the trail slithers through a warren of arroyos. I retrace my steps, climb back up the bank to the trail, look down at the arroyo’s colors from above. Step aside for people and dogs and bikes.

Colors pop under bright blue sky, puffs of cloud. Fallen juniper berries glow lavender on red ground.

I reach the big, gnarly Arroyo Seco, the deep canyon yawning from the overlooks I passed. I cross Arroyo Seco for the first time. Navigate the trail up through red rock with white polka dots, deep-purple soil under my feet.

I’m alone on this side of the arroyo. I reach a mesa, break for lunch, ravenous. I’m looking directly at Tetilla Peak, the tan and black of the Dome Wilderness. Fresh snow coats Redondo Peak in the Jemez, the Sangre de Cristos.

Wind whooshes. Birds chirp, tweet, caw. No other sounds.

Back on the near side of the arroyo, I stop at a plaque with a poem on it. It instructs me to take in my surroundings, read the poem, then sit or stand in quiet and use my senses. I am the creator of the experience of the art installation, it says.

I look, listen, read the poem, close my eyes.

A breeze blows my hat brim back. I see only sun on the backs of my eyelids.

This sensation is what I seek, the feeling that the sun and warmth come with me when I go back into the house.

I open my eyes.

“Hoo!” yells a cyclist huffing up the hill I just huffed.

Time to move.

The smell of spring fills my nostrils. The smell that has comforted me, delighted me, for decades.

My mom fills our yard with it.

It brightened my desk all week during endless hours of reporting scary, heartbreaking news.

Daffodils.

In a pinon-juniper woodland, many miles from the nearest flowerbed, I smell daffodils.

It’s not the first hallucination I’ve had out here.

It will get me through another night in captivity.

Hike length: 7+ miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: for this place, OMG

Wildlife spotted/heard: mountain chickadees, pinyon jays, crows, robins, Western wood-pewees, dead tarantula

March 15, 2020

O ye of little faith: Del Agua Trail after a storm will give you something to believe in

“Hear that?”

I do.

It rushes, trickles, gurgles.

I shouldn’t be surprised. We are, after all, on Del Agua Trail, at the north end of the Sandias.

But I live in the desert. Where a wet spot that flows a few weeks a year merits the name “spring.” Where even a rare perennial spring might be just a drip.

The day after a storm dumped half an inch of rain, we’ve found a gusher.

It sounds like a waterfall. It’s not. It’s a stream. It runs for at least half a mile. There, the trail and the stream cease crossing each other and become one. We turn around.

The stand of cottonwoods where the stream lives is in the center of this photo

Miles inside granite, this stream nourishes a stand of cottonwoods, reeds, grasses. Birds call. Butterflies flutter.

Exodus 17: Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.

Tomorrow morning, Sunday, my church will have no services. It probably won’t have services for weeks, as public health officials urge us to avoid gatherings, keep “social distance,” and slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

I have been a churchgoer since I was a little girl. Nine years ago I left the faith I grew up in, but I didn’t leave church. I walked out those doors one Sunday and into other doors the next Sunday, and the next, until I found a church that felt like home.

Four walls do not make a faith. But without them, do I really have it?

I didn’t believe there was water in this canyon until I saw it, which is the definition of not-faith.

I sit beside the unbelievable stream. My husband leaps onto a giant fallen cottonwood trunk and walks down it.

He has leapt onto many less-advisable things with no consequences. But today his luck runs out. His foot slips and he lands with all his weight on his left ankle. A sprain.

Our car sits more than three miles away.

Tree my better half should not have walked down

If we can get to the bottom of this steep trail, I can walk the two miles of forest road back to the car and drive it down to the trailhead to pick him up. My little car and this rough road are not a great match, but I’ve driven it out here before.

We navigate the trail around ridges, through arroyos. I look back at my husband. He doesn’t want to throw me off balance on the narrow trail. Instead, he leans on one of my hiking poles for support, favors his right leg and braces himself on rock with his right hand.

He catches my eye and grins, despite the pain.

Fifteen years ago, when we were dating, we traveled from the East Coast to visit his family in Santa Fe. My husband and his dad got violently ill with a stomach bug. As weak as my husband was, as bad as he felt, he still smiled at me and spoke with kindness.

That’s when I knew.

I catch a glimpse of a vault toilet far below. I know this toilet; I call it “toilet in paradise,” because of its beautiful setting. At the trailhead.

If I can see the trailhead, we can reach it.

Here I go again, believing only what I can see.

Still, it feels like faith.

Hike length: 6+ miles

Difficulty: moderate

Wildlife spotted/heard/smelled: Western bluebirds, butterflies, skunk, pinyon jays, crow, box elder beetles

Trail traffic: light

March 8, 2020March 8, 2020

Butterflies and chalky cliffs on the South Crest Trail

Something dark moves. I jump.

It darts, resolving into a deep brown butterfly, wings tipped yellow.

These butterflies have been my constant companions on this hike. Occasionally, smaller orange and gray butterflies join them, often in pairs.

Spring hovers on the South Crest Trail. Mud puddles on shaded switchbacks two weeks after the last snow, the earth around the mud baked hard. Mountain bluebirds flock and chirp above canyons layered with evergreen.

My legs and lungs, on their first long hike at elevation since fall, slowly settle into rhythm.

The bump on the horizon is Cedro Peak in the Manzanita Mountains

San Pedro and Ortiz mountains on horizon

West of the junction with Upper Faulty Trail, a tunnel of trees frozen in autumn. Dead leaves carpet a layer of ice.

A short climb later, limestone cliffs ripple, chalky, like the ones we saw at Palomas Peak last summer. Green yucca blades stud the ivory rock.

Three miles into wilderness, I hear the whoosh of semis on Interstate 40 below.

Snow caps the top of Tijeras Canyon’s walls. The Manzano Mountains, which looked naked as a jaybird from Abó Pass last week, are clearly snowpacked above 8,000 feet.

The sun inhabits every surface. My ears tingle in the breeze.

A day to linger, soak in warmth, stop at every overlook, breathe in the smell of spring mud.

And be frequently startled by butterflies.

Hike length: 6 miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: moderate, none west of Upper Faulty Trail

Wildlife spotted: butterflies, nuthatch, crows, mountain bluebirds, pinyon jays

March 1, 2020

The hills around Abó Pass are irresistible. And foreboding.

“Is that another bone?” I ask, squinting. We’ve seen a lot of bones today.

“It’s a foot,” my husband responds. “A fresh one.”

As in, not just bones.

“A human foot?!!”

“No, an elk foot.”

Strange things happen out here.

We came to the foothills of the Los Pinos Mountains for a four-mile hike using arroyos and old roads.

We used arroyos and old roads, and we hiked four miles, but we did not find the red rock butte or overlook that the route promised.

Now we look for fossils in the limestone layer on top of a ridge. Red fossils, with dissolved iron replacing rock.

Rocks and slabs clunk under our feet. The Manzano Mountains stand tall and gray against blue sky. The sun rakes them. When you’re in the Manzanos, lush microclimates abound. But from here they look naked, barren. A huge plain slopes to the west.

The red fossils begin to appear. They’re tiny. Million-year-old tube worms?

We sit on a rock slab. Next to me, a tiny fossil edged in red. Its interior sparkles like a geode.

Red fossil on left, “geode”-ish fossil on right

The sun and the breeze lull. Clouds roll shadow over the Manzanos and the mesa next to them. Silence falls. Vehicles whoosh toward Abó Pass.

When we stand up, after a long time, I see another tiny geode fossil in the rock where I’d sat.

The walk back to the car yields an impressive view of Cerro Montoso. The hike I might never finish.

The mountain looks gentle, draped with evergreen. A seam bisects it: a fence running straight up. The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge boundary.

Cerro Montoso has another name in our house: “scary hike.”

We came out here years ago to hike it. We saw more scat than I had ever seen in my life, most of which we could not identify.

On the way up, we passed an elk carcass. A mountain lion had torn out its throat.

The strenuous climb up the mountain took us so long we feared we’d run out of daylight. The sky hung low, ominous, but too flat and lazy to even threaten rain.

About two-thirds of the way up the mountain, we decided to head back down.

It was years before I knew that there was a good chance the mountain lion was still in the area that day, near its kill.

The path up the mountain isn’t a trail. It’s a steep, uneven corridor a few feet wide, barbed wire at your right elbow, thick cacti at your left.

Your first move in a mountain lion encounter, if you want to live: back away slowly.

It would have been almost impossible on that steep slope, with obstacles on each side.

In hindsight, I was not ready for that hike. I may never be, though I think often about trying it again one day. We had an incredible view of those mountains and plains as we climbed. The view from the top would be incomparable, and it’s one very few people have had.

I’m glad we found another route to explore these irresistible pinon-juniper hills. One with wide-open vistas, where you can see what’s coming – and where you could find escape routes if you needed them.

And I’m very glad we didn’t see anything more threatening than an elk foot.

Hike length: 5.5 miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: none

Wildlife spotted/heard: crows, blue jays, cottontail, chipmunk, mountain chickadees

Notes:

This hike is from “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque,” by David Ryan and Steven Ausherman, and it is the source of my information about why the fossils on the limestone ridge are red. Cerro Montoso was in an earlier version of the book, but has been removed. Maybe it scared them too.

Abundant and beautiful primitive campsites line the road that takes you to the limestone ridge. The fire pits in the campsites we saw had not been used in quite a while. This land clearly gets very few human visitors, and we speculated most of them come to hunt.