Canyons – Page 3 – Woman Seeks Elevation

July 7, 2019

Embudito Canyon’s funky, tingly, flowery forest

We try to talk each other out of it.

That huge creature soaring high above the canyon probably isn’t an eagle.

I can’t be sure what I’m seeing, with sweat in my eyes and watercolor Albuquerque levitating below us.

We’re on Embudito Trail, one of the most beautiful hikes close to the city – one I’d normally never do in summer. Its stunning first two-plus miles scale steep canyon walls with no trees to speak of. In full summer sun, hiking it feels like roasting on a griddle.

Want shade on the first section of this trail? Better find a boulder.

Thankfully, it’s unusually cool this morning, thanks to last night’s monsoon rain. It’s also unusually humid.

We lose the not-eagle in the cloud smudges. We round a corner and realize we’d taken our break just short of an outstanding overlook, forested peaks and ridges on all sides.

Then we climb into them for the first time.

Two hours into our hike, everything that came before evaporates. Ponderosas coalesce into a canopy. The temperature drops 15 degrees. Aspens shoot up from mossy two-ton boulders. Yarrow and penstemon narrow the trail from both sides.

Forest funk fills the air. My arms tingle from the cool breeze and the phytochemicals.

I have never felt a sensation like it. I tell my husband.

“Is it just your left arm?”

“No, it’s both. Why?”

“Because that would be a heart attack.”

This is not that. I don’t know what this forest is manufacturing, but I just finished “The Overstory” and I know my blood pressure is probably improving every time I inhale.

The grade of the trail lessens through the forest, but then the switchbacks begin again. The entire trail is rated difficult. It’s midday and the forecast cloud cover is nowhere to be seen (I knew I was rolling the dice with that and I might lose.)

It’s time to haul my tired legs back down the griddle.

Good thing I have a lungful of mysterious forest compounds to propel me.

Hike length: 7 miles

Difficulty: difficult

Trail traffic: lots until you reach the forest

Wildlife spotted/heard: quail, curve-billed thrasher, hawk, butterflies, cicadas, bluejays, horny toad, lizards, velvet ant, crows. And after consulting the bird book on what an eagle looks like from below (I’ve only seen one once for sure), I think there’s a good chance that was a golden eagle.

May 12, 2019

Golden Open Space, shapeshifter edition

One moment, sun and blue sky so intense the land’s vibrant colors must compete hard to be seen.

Clouds move over. The canyon’s deeper hues emerge, red and gold, pink and tan.

The Sandia Mountains loom beyond the canyon’s end, blurred by precipitation.

The flint-smell of rain. The first drops hit the red and blue rocks. Then fatter drops.

The curtain falls, and Golden Open Space transforms.

The place we knew before this is rocky juniper rim and wizened red canyons and sun, so much sun.

The steady rain and gray sky wash everything to rust and green. The forested hills all around the open space, usually unnoticed in the sun, emerge. Tiny clusters of wildflowers pulse yellow. Shrubs we’ve never seen in leaf here glow green.

Now it’s more than rain: tiny hail pellets, maybe, or graupel. It pings cool off my arms.

I’m both focused in the scene around me and in my head. Worried the mountain bike trail we’re walking on will turn to muck. Worried I’ll get too chilled with the temperature drop, which hit just after I ditched my hoodie for a light cotton T-shirt and copiously applied sunscreen.

But I see sun and some blue sky over the rim. The tiny hail abates. The rain slows to a light mist, droplets catching the light.

On the rim, bruise-gray clouds enter a dramatic duel with late-afternoon rays.

We scramble up a knoll to see the light and shadow on the mountains and plains. All three of us aim our cameras at once, even my husband, now wielding a smartphone after a lifetime of flip phone ownership.

We spot wildflowers as we walk back through the juniper hills: Indian paintbrush, Apache plume. Yellow and purple, red and white. We’re sure we hear thunder in the canyon behind us.

As the rain transformed the land, it transformed me. I’d clenched my teeth so much this week that my face throbbed. That pain began to abate, replaced by a throbbing in my feet that would remind me for hours to come: I’d had an experience.

Hike length: 7 miles

Difficulty: moderate

Trail traffic: none

Wildlife spotted: butterflies, crows, vulture, deer crossing the road as we drove away

March 17, 2019

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