The tune: Robert Palmer’s “I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On.” The setting that kept luring us further: Osha Loop Trail on the east side of the Sandia Mountains.
We’d been out late dancing the night before (still got it, baby!), so we had sore feet and weren’t sure how far we’d get. At a trail junction three miles into our hike, we deemed it better to head back than to try to finish the whole seven-mile-plus jaunt. This meant climbing back up the steep ridge we’d just descended.
My Robert Palmer adaptation played in my head as we neared the top of the ridge. Then we startled a doe, and everything froze. She stared at us, walked a few steps, sniffed the air, repeated the sequence several times, then turned and trotted into the forest.
We’ve had several deer encounters hiking, but never on this side of the mountain. The trails, while not crowded, are popular. Osha Loop, though, is a wilderness trail, less used and less maintained. Wild rose and gambel oak squeeze the rocky path.
What can I say, we’re really sappy
Even on 10K Trail, the popular trail that’s the primary access to Osha Loop, we passed relatively few people. The breeze at 10,000 feet cooled us as the temperature below in Albuquerque approached 100.
There are some epic shrooms in this spruce-fir forest
The quiet allowed us to see not just the doe, but two sharp-shinned hawks. Who knows what else we could have spotted if we’d done the whole trail.
When I attempt this trail again, I’ll do so on fresh feet.
Hike length: 6 miles
Difficulty: moderate
Trail traffic: light
Wildlife spotted: squirrels, chipmunk, butterflies, grasshoppers, nuthatches, brown creepers, sharp-shinned hawks, doe
Things to know: There are quite a few precariously positioned and hazardous dead trees on the first couple miles of 10K Trail North right now.
Shadow plays down the ridge. We await its transformation.
The Gutierrez Canyon Open Space overlook bakes in the afternoon sun. My husband lies on the rock. I tell him he looks like he’s on a funeral pyre.
Shade. One could nap on the pyre now. I recline on rock, monsoon breeze cooling me, and consider it. Huge puzzle piece clouds slide over, lock into each other.
Guadalupe and Mosca Peaks stand bruise-blue on the horizon. The hue communicates the rain we can’t see.
Narrow trails twist through pinon and juniper spiked with moss and lichen. A handful of crows bleat furiously as we pass. My husband suspects a predator nearby, maybe a bobcat. When we pass back by, the crows crank a new symphony. Maybe it’s us they’re protesting.
Something’s been about, though. A rabbit, recently bloodied, lies dead on the trail, a warning.
We pass no one, see nothing but life and death.
Hike length: 5 miles
Difficulty: moderate
Trail traffic: none
Wildlife spotted/heard: beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, crows, hawk, nuthatch, sparrows, striped and spotted lizards, dead rabbit
The unmajestic sound – a squirrel-like chittering – tells us that’s a majestic eagle swooping above the Crest Trail. Two, actually.
We’ve claimed one of the finest snack spots within driving distance of Albuquerque, a limestone shelf under a tree. Behind us, the historic stone Kiwanis Cabin commands the tip of a promontory. North of us, the Kiwanis Meadow glows green. In front of us, the Crest Trail flirts with the cliff’s edge. The San Pedro and Ortiz mountains slope beyond. Two nights of rain washed the sky clear as a bell.
It’s no wonder everybody and their dog – literally – is out here.
Steps from your car, or the tram, you’ll find a jaw-dropping cliffside view above 10,000 feet where the mountain just plunges away.
WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS PIPE DOING HERE
Or you’ll walk into Albuquerque’s little slice of cathedral forest and breathe in wet fir, the greatest scent on the tree menu.
My husband could have hiked this trail twice in the time I took checking out every overlook. Slick limestone, muddy tree roots and making way for other humans kept us alert. The accents and languages we heard were nearly as diverse as the scenery.
Most excellent fossil I’ve seen in the Sandias
Somehow we ended up hiking a forest road most of the way back from the tram terminal. Fewer people, fewer views, more butterflies. I aimed my camera at five or six fritillaries, but wasn’t fast enough to capture a single one.
One more pass through the deep dark forest, uphill this time, and city and mountains and sky open before us again.
You don’t have to go far to get far.
Hike length: 5 miles
Difficulty: moderate
Wildlife spotted/heard: golden eagles, crow, violet-green swallows, swifts, nuthatches, least chipmunk, butterflies, horny toad, deer and fawn (on the Sandia Crest Highway)
Many days in the forest, birds blur at the edge of our peripheral vision, nothing discernible except “small,” maybe “brown.”
Now, sitting in a grove of ponderosa pines on Armijo Trail, nuthatches resolve into focus. Once they do, we see them everywhere: sailing from tree to tree, corkscrewing up and down trunks. We identify their testy chirps.
“Small” will resolve itself at other points today into woodpeckers, two sparrows in a spindly pinon, a flicker brushing a ponderosa’s crown.
Butterflies emerge, too: the orange and pink of painted ladies, swallowtails highlighted blue and black. Tassel-tailed Abert’s squirrels wrap around tree trunks, gallop up the trail like dogs.
Abe, the blurry Abert’s squirrelAlligator juniper
When we began this hike, along Cienega Trail’s spring, a riot of wildflowers attracted so many butterflies it was tough to zero in on any one.
Before I could see anything, I had to hear. How a grumpy person’s heavy footfalls on a rocky trail sound just like grumbling.
I’ve had a low-grade grouch on all week – exactly the amount of time since our last soaking rain. Exactly the amount of time since the humidity rose and some of this year’s epic grass pollen washed away.
Building above the ponderosas: the kind of towering cloud that could make something happen. Ten, 20, 30 percent chance – these numbers mean little in monsoon season. It will rain when it will rain.
Until then, the abundance of this year’s growing things burn my eyes – but I can see.
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.
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.
The whine intensifies, as if someone were drilling nearby.
It’s a cicada, half a note higher than the drone of his brothers and sisters all around us.
It’s a hot morning at Ojito de San Antonio, a small Bernalillo County open space near the East Mountains. The trail begins in a meadow where a historic acequia feeds an orchard, and the orchard feeds birds. Then the trail climbs through rocky juniper, and, this time of year, cicadas.
This lovely fellow was lying on the trail, recently deceased.
At the top, stacks of boulders look down on the meadow tucked into evergreen hills, and down on Highway 14 (conveniently located is, well, conveniently located). A single violet-green swallow swoops above us.
We emerge back into the meadow, counting wildflowers, butterflies and fruits. We spot apples, pears, apricots and mulberries.
Those who want to see the bounty this year have exactly one month to do so. Ojito de San Antonio reportedly closes from August to November so the East Mountains’ bears can have the fruit all to themselves before hibernation.
The first time I stood on this spot, I understood every bumpy plane ride I’d had over the Sandias on a clear day.
The overlook at the top of Tree Springs Trail provides one of the best panoramas you’ll find of Albuquerque. And, like many a bare rock ledge at 9,500 feet elevation, it gets a daily whipping from the wind.
Tucked under a tree, we found enough stillness to eat a snack and soak up the sun. My husband explored a rocky promontory we often check out, but the footing’s a little precarious, so I didn’t chance it. Gusts had me listing even when taking a photo well back from the ledge.
Tree Springs Trail traverses high-elevation meadows and ridges, mostly in the shade of fir and spruce, with an occasional sunny climb. It’s a haven for wildflowers, hikers and dogs. Today we witnessed a first: four guys on fat-tire unicycles.
Fossil in the limestone
We usually flee to Tree Springs when the mercury nears 100 in the valley. Today, unseasonably cool in Albuquerque, felt even more spectacular up here: the temperature on the trail never climbed above 70, and a cool breeze bathed the trail. A brief windstorm had blown away two nights of heavy smoke from Arizona’s Woodbury Fire, leaving fierce blue skies behind.
Vultures and hawks soar above us, riding the cool breeze that whips at the overlook.
The Estancia Valley rolls away to the east. Veins of red soil ripple the green plains between us and the San Pedro and Ortiz mountains.
We stare out at a giant obelisk, a Titanic of rock, pale cliffs rising from forested slopes.
Between us and the obelisk, a wooded valley. A dirt road plunges into the valley, rolls around it, then climbs out the other side.
I want to go there, I think.
Then I realize that’s the place we already planned to go next.
II. Palomas Peak
My knees scream.
Something screams louder.
“Is that a mountain screamer?” I ask my husband, trying to make light of the sound. I’d learned from a dialect quiz that in some places in the U.S., people call mountain lions “mountain screamers.”
He laughs.
Some kind of bird we can’t see is making the sound, an eerie one I’ve never heard, and it doesn’t let up. I wonder if it’s in distress, or distressing something else.
I wonder if it’s at the edge of its capabilities.
I’m pretty sure I am.
The Palomas Peak ridgeline twists and bumps along, tight against the bands of limestone we’d seen earlier.
Splintered and fallen rock litters the trail. Just a couple of steps beyond us, the slope plunges into the canyon.
My husband spots climbing pitons in the rock wall above us. I don’t see any of them. I’m mostly watching my feet.
But from our spot near the ridgeline’s end, we can look back at the cliffs we just walked under, the endless green ridges.
We navigate the rugged ridgeline back to the steep trail that brought us here.
At a junction, we visit Lagunita Seca meadow, which we bypassed on the way up.
We sit under a tree, eat a snack and look out at all the shades of green.
We head back to our car on a path that’s nearly swallowed by waist-high grass and wild rose and head-high Gambel oak.
Palomas Peak’s rock bands and evergreens, now high above us again, peek through the growth.
We saw many things on the Palomas Peak Trail. They did not include footprints. It’s the wildest place we’ve seen in five years of hiking the Sandias.
-Palomas Peak Trail is unmaintained; the ridgeline is rough, as noted above; and about a quarter mile from the trailhead, multiple partially fallen dead trees present a serious hazard. Hike at your own risk.
-I’ll save you a half-hour of wandering around parking lots and roads by telling you that Capulin Peak Trail begins at the snow play area, not the picnic area.
-Capulin Peak Trail would be an outstanding hike for small children, but keep them very close at the end of the trail. The dropoffs from the overlook are steep.
-The dirt valley road noted above is Highway 165 West to Placitas. It is stunning, especially this summer with the creek running. If you have a truck, take it. If you don’t have a truck, you can still drive this road, but take it very slowly.
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.
What this route lacks: a place to step off the trail and cry.
A single flat boulder about three-quarters of the way up could serve that purpose. By then, you can practically see the top of the trail, though you might cry over how far away it still is.
We’re on the Ojo del Orno Route in Placitas. This shortcut accesses a gorgeous ridgeline by bypassing the first 2.6 miles of the Sandia Crest Trail’s northern section.
Remember, though, Mama told you: there are no shortcuts.
This trail maintains what feels like a 50-degree angle for its entire mile. It seems to switchback every few feet, instead of every few hundred feet. Its rocky surface means you often slip backward (ie down) when you brace to take the next giant step up. It’s hard to remove your eyes from your feet.
But when I managed to do so today, I saw shoulder-high wild rose. I saw deciduous trees glow in the sun. I saw enormous bulges of rock rise above us and, when I could look down, an amazing amount of canyon accumulate below us. Near the top of the arroyo, trees with sweet-smelling white blossoms lined the path.
At last the ridgeline. A little further, a rock wall that overlooks Santa Ana Pueblo’s green-topped mesas.
My husband stretched out on the rock wall in the sun. Twenty minutes later, he showed no signs of leaving.
I could barely see the jagged Ortiz Mountains through the trees on the other side of the trail, though, and I wanted more.
I headed just a little further, then a little more, then a little more. The Ortiz popped into view, then the Sangre de Cristos another 30 miles away, dusted with fresh snow on May 25.
I went so far my husband came looking for me, thinking I might somehow have gotten off trail.
We retraced our steps, bypassing the Ojo del Orno, since descending it was unthinkable. The Crest Trail squeezed against a cool rock wall that rose high into the sky.
Our guidebook says many people find the first three and a half miles of the Crest Trail boring.
“It’s boring,” said the fellow we met in the parking lot.
This is false. What is true: the first part of the Crest Trail is incredibly hot. The rock wall provided the day’s last real shade. The air temperature was only around 72, but the trail was still blazing.
We saw the rumpled hills of Placitas, and a mystery black-capped red ridge further beyond. We saw tiny purple flowers with yellow centers blaze from the earth, electric-yellow cactus.
I have no pictures of any of it. I was hustling, desperate to get out of the sun. I privately cursed every sun-loving family we had to stop and let pass us on their way up. I wanted only one thing, and it was back at the trailhead.
At last we reached it; a gargantuan cottonwood fed by Tunnel Spring. We crossed the road to put our sweaty hands into the cold water. The spring gurgled from a pipe that periodically croaked like a frog.
Tunnel Spring flows from a pipe in the rock.
I knew the canyon fed by this spring must be stunning right now. I’ve been there. Years ago, we went up Ojo del Orno, climbed another 1,500 feet to the top of the ridge, then came very slowly down through the outrageously steep, densely wooded Agua Sarca Canyon. I could barely use my legs for two days after that.
-The dirt road from Placitas Highway 165 to the trailhead is only 1.4 miles. How bad can it be? TERRIBLE. It was already bad, and this year’s rain and snow have carved enormous chunks out of it. We took my little car up there. BAD MOVE. Take a high-clearance vehicle.
-The co-author of the new edition of “60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque” told me at a Q&A that he took Tunnel Spring out of the book because the first few miles of the Crest Trail have some very narrow ledges that he was uncomfortable on with his dogs.
-Speaking of narrow ledges, I would not go anywhere near this road or this area’s steep terrain in wet or icy weather.
-All of that said, this area has some of the most beautiful terrain in the entire Sandias. If it sounds like fun to you, you should go soon. Local homeowners are raising heck with the Forest Service and Sandoval County about the condition of the road-rightfully so. When that happens, it sometimes leads to road access to a trailhead being closed. I have no hard evidence that this will happen at Tunnel Spring, but I fear it could.
Woman Seeks Elevation 