Month: October 2020

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Haunting a river’s ghost at Valle de Oro

I could cross the Rio Grande here and not get wet.

I stand on the riverbank at Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge. The river’s all but dry in this spot. One small channel of water courses through it.

Water flows further south, but in places it’s only an inch deep.

And still, constant bird music.

A great blue heron stands on a sandbar, then lifts off.

Ducks spring from the bank, honking.

Sandhill cranes coast above, creaking like a rusty hinge in the wind.

Creatures upon creatures trace the river’s drying veins, find nourishment.

We have made this hot, dry world with our thirsty vehicles, our plastic packaging.

Yet we can make space for these creatures, too.

The refuge, carved out of an industrial area, ever changing. This summer they closed the refuge’s dirt roads to vehicles so the old pastures can revert to wetlands. To reach the bosque now requires a shadeless 2-mile walk from the refuge’s entrance.

The refuge’s visitor center, under construction.

Here in Albuquerque’s South Valley, air quality can reach unhealthy levels. Dust and dirt from the area’s industrial operations often hang in the air, while my neighbors and I breathe freely further north.

But a river refuge, even a drying one, gives all of us creatures a space to breathe.

Hike length: 5.6 miles

Difficulty: easy

Trail traffic: very light

Wildlife spotted/heard: great blue herons, sandhill cranes, geese, ducks, butterflies, grasshoppers, coyote, American dipper, swallows

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Cañada de la Cueva: Sand, stone and sun

It’s too hot for this.

Well, it will be. Now, cool east wind brushes canyon walls’ shadow.

The predator sun lurks like the hawks above, the bobcats whose scat dots this arroyo.

The temperature will climb above 80 here, in the hills at 6,000 feet elevation, on October 17.

The wind will shift to the west, whip into a gale. Red flag warning. So dry any spark would kindle and spread instantly.

But we have a few hours before all of that. And we’ll see very few humans here at Cañada de la Cueva. That was the deciding factor, with 812 new cases of the virus in the state yesterday. A record that broke a record that broke a record.

The canyon squeezes and opens. Rock walls emerge: lichen-stitched basalt blocks, pebbles embedded in stone. The Ortiz Mountains prairie-dog above the canyon.

Miles downstream, we see one, then another and another horseback rider descend from the hills to the canyon.

Even this far in, all are masked, as we are. I silently thank them.

“Did you come from the dump?” one rider asks. (Yes, this trailhead is at a dump.)*

We tell him we did.

“That’s a long walk!” he says.

“Yes, and it’ll feel longer going uphill on the way back,” I laugh.

Uphill. In sand. And heat.

The return a two-hour trudge. I knew it would be.

But the big, dark rock walls cover us with coolness as we pass.

The sky glows incandescent blue, a shade that appears only in fall here, that appears even when it feels like summer.

The sky still knows what to do.

Hike length: 7.4 miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: very light

Creatures spotted/heard: ravens, hawk, flycatchers, tarantula hawk, butterfly, dragonflies, dark-eyed juncos, flicker

*Where did you hear of a hike that starts at a dump? In “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque,” of course!

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Paliza Canyon: Dusty goblins and a mighty little creek

Deep in the ponderosa dark, color blazes.

Morning sun crawls over the canyon wall, lights a creekside tangle of leaves red and yellow.

A child could step across Vallecito Creek, the trickle of water that powers this ecosystem.

Fall falls right in front of us, breeze gliding red Virginia creeper leaves to the ground.

The creek bed runs dry before we reach our destination: Paliza Canyon Goblin Colony, a canyon wall’s worth of hoodoos and tent rocks, thumbs and OK signs and bawdier shapes.

The goblins bake. Do they remember water? Two inches of dust and sand coat our boots.

My husband climbs steep ridges while I peer over hills and mesas through towers of tuff. A thumb-sized horned lizard enjoys shadow.

We walk a steep mesa road. The burn scar we found two years ago is mostly healed. But bark peels brittle from the trees, their sap crusty and dry. And the dust – every step stirs it.

The creekside forest, brighter now, cools us as we descend.

On our drive out of the canyon, a red-tailed hawk swoops over the road, a small snake in her mouth.

A braid of golden cottonwoods winds through the valley. At the place where the braid crosses the road, a dry wash, and a sign: Vallecito Creek.

This hardworking little stream, stretched thin as it is, nourishes the whole valley.

Hike length: 5.5+ miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: light

Wildlife spotted/heard: Stellar’s jays, ravens, chipmunk, horned lizard, butterflies, flickers, flycatchers, red-tailed hawk, snake, Abert’s squirrel, mockingbirds, canyon towhees

This wonderful hike is from David Ausherman and Stephen Ryan’s “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque.”

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Nothing gold can stay: Post-peak aspens, Sandia fall

Gold coins shiver in the wind.

So do I.

The aspens on the Sandia Crest slopes usually glow yellow the first Saturday in October.

Today one yellow patch blankets the mountain. Around it, leaves have tipped past yellow to gold, or fallen, leaving trunks naked.

Who knows why? Maybe that bizarre freeze just after Labor Day hastened the leaves’ change. Or maybe the lack of anything else resembling seasonal temperatures, or precipitation, left the aspens confused about when to do their thing.

It still looks the way fall looks up here: blue, green and gold.

Clear above and below. Beyond that, haze from fires a thousand miles away. It’s begun to feel like a permanent condition.

Most days, the fire hydrant of Cabezon Peak would loom large from here. Today it’s a shadow of a thumb.

It still feels the way fall feels up here: warm and cold, light and shadow.

But no year, no month, no day is just an anomaly anymore.

The changes in our climate reshape even a world of sun and stone.

Hike length: 6 miles

Route: Survey Trail to 10K Trail overlook

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: light-moderate

Wildlife spotted/heard: deer and chipmunk on Crest Highway; squirrels, dove, jays, crow, hawk, dark-eyed junco, dusky flycatchers, flickers