Suerte, 1994 - 2014

He was well named. Found abandoned in a dumpster when very young, Suerte was with me for the best 20 years of my life. We miss our little buddy and we hope that if we are lucky and our karma is good, we'll run into him again in a future life.

Thanks for your time with us, Suerte.

The Edge: White Rock Canyon of the Rio Grande

Rio Grande at the bottom of the White Rock Canyon.

This time I decided to follow the power lines to the canyon. I figured the power company would have chosen the narrowest part of the canyon to cross and therefore, the most dramatic part. And the maintenance road under the lines would provide relatively easy access.

I was half right. The view at the end was quite nice. But the road sucked just as bad as the other roads out there. Yet the truck got me close and the gps kept me from getting lost and I entirely enjoyed the walk, the good weather (at least good for December) and the great views.

View across the canyon looking up Ancho Canyon. Jemez mountains in the distance.

The white cliffs atop Ancho Canyon are examples of Bandelier Tuff and gives White Rock Canyon its name. 

View south down the canyon. Frijoles Canyon enters from the west and the plateau in the center is Bandelier National Monument.

A view northward. The outcropping is a typical basalt flow. The entire area is basalt or volcanic debris.

The river existed before the volcanos deposted all the stuff that forms the cliffs and plateaus. So here the canyon was more built up around the river than the river cut down to create the canyon.

Power lines crossing the canyon. Sangre de Cristos in the distance.

The buff cliff in the middle is another example of Bandelier Tuff.

Power lines.

To me, this looks like a kitty sitting and watching the canyon. The suspended balls are bubbles blown by this kitty.

Cyndi just sees a power pole. I think Cyndi needs to eat more mushrooms.

Christmas decorations across the canyon.

The primary colors and floating balls are rather Googley, aren't they?

Typical view into a side canyon. Note the Bandelier Tuff topped by local basalt flows.

Sangre de Cristos

Bears do shit in the woods. Mostly on jeep trails. Lots of bear poop out here.

This is the only other car I saw on this trek. And this guy has the right idea: airlift your four wheel drive vehicle out here.

Eeek, Hmmm, Ooooh

Three micro-adventures presented in reverse title order.

On a short drive up thru the Carson National Forest on Hwy 111 west of Taos I stopped to examine these rocks. If we'd had any mushrooms, we'd still be there Oooohing. Enjoyed a nice picnic, didn't enjoy seeing the recently fallen snow and were unbothered by the single other vehicle we encountered.

Cyndi stayed in the truck while I watched the rocks.
Later she said "Wow, I wish I'd been there."

The previous day I found the Rito Horse Trap while wandering in the Caja. The trap was built along the lines George Frison describes as a sheep trap in his classic Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains. If it works, don't fix it. No horses were seen near the trap and the few horse hoof prints I found were leading away from the area. I also found a cow's thigh bone, which I brought home for Cyndi's birthday next week.

Hmmmm. A trap.
Let's Go!

The Forest Service has removed the sign actually at the trap.
The trap doesn't get much use but how often do you need to trap horses?

A blind, I presume. Someone would hide in here, then jump out at the last minute,
scaring the horse to turn in the desired direction.

A fence flag. Doesn't look like much but I assume these are to keep the horses away from the fence.

The business end of the trap. The main fences funnel the horses into this small corral.
In prehistory the Indians would then kill and eat the sheep.
Now-a-days we kill the horses but are too civilized to eat them.
Civilized.

This is the one of the reasons I wander out here. A nice view of Bandelier.

And the day before that I walked down and back up La Bajada along the old Camino Real / Route 66 track. I encountered old timers with stories, a luckless tranantula, Santa Fe's fiber optic feed and a road sign from the 30's.

500 years ago a Spanish road engineer said "We need to build a road here"
And I'll be damned, somehow they managed it.

The road engineer didn't see these as an obstacle.

The first part of the ascent wasn't that daunting.

But it starts to get worse.

I guess they first put in this fiber optic run, then the road on top of that.
Someone would like to fix this but they can't figure out how to get to it anymore.
This, by the way, is the road.

Eeeek. A desert tarantula.
Boy, these things are fast. But then, if I had eight long legs, I could scurry right along, too.

A billboard, 1930's style.
The Santa Fe camp was located approximately where the Georgia O'Keefe museum is today.

Amazingly, the lower section of the Santa Fe River has water in it.
Flowing water.
15 miles upstream, the river is dry as it passes thru Santa Fe, where (for the
most part) it was already drying up in the 1700's.

Not much happens here but I enjoy what does.

Rocks are what we got

On our return from Mesa Verde, we took a short detour to indulge in one of our favorite activities: watching rocks. At Angel Peak we were entertained by young 60 million year old mudstones from the early mammalian era and above the Brazos Box we watched middle aged 1.6 billion year old quartzite. Like people, the young rocks were vibrant and colorful while the older rocks were gray and staid. There is nothing like rock watching to make you feel young and alive.

OK, so there are too many redundant pictures here. But I like them.

Angel Peak
and an actual Angel

Sample of colors

Same, but different

Even more different

On to Brazos

The Angel followed me

The Fall Color

Yes, the color. Singular.

Here in the southern Rockies the fall color is yellow. Sure, there are other colors. The sky is blue, the pine trees green, the granite is often pink. A teeny percentage of the trees turn orange and some of the undergrowth becomes a rusty red. But it is overwhelmingly yellow aspens.

I heard one tourist say "It sure is pretty but I don't like yellow." Well, in a few months there actually will be only one color: white. This is way better.

Next to an RV from Wisconsin I found this empty bottle.

No, this isn't me.

Ah, pink granite. And a few orange aspens.

Wow! More orange.

Lots of blue at this altitude.

Terminated

That was the word they used. Terminated. After fifteen weeks of performing “the most important function of a citizen” our service was terminated. Unpaid and un-thanked.

In five attempts I was chosen for not a single jury. Most were not selected. But one lucky citizen managed to serve on four trials. Several others managed three. If you got selected once, you were likely to be selected again. No wonder people tried so hard to avoid selection.

Most were civil cases. In the next-to-last session a woman who hit the car in front of her was suing the cop behind her. Her attorney asked “Who would believe more in a policeman's testimony?” and a few unenthusiastic hands were waved. Then “Who would disbelieve a policeman's testimony?” and well over half the group shot their hands in the air, waving violently, spitting out angry emotional stories and expressing unflattering opinions towards police in general. Apparently implementation of the Broken Window Theory has had unintended consequences.

In the last case a young man whose cancer had returned after treatment by two different hospitals was finally in full remission after a month long experimental stem cell treatment by a third hospital. During that treatment his forearm was unexpectedly scarred. He was suing the hospital because of the scar.

This last selection was our final week of service and the second week in a row we had to appear. And the trial was to start 3 weeks after our service was scheduled to end. This news was not well received by the group of prospective jurors. The judge had a near riot on his hands.  The Jury Services Specialists II had screwed up the schedule and they were bureaucratically unapologetic. I finished my haiku:

Low-paid Functionary
stacks forms,
checks boxes
'till sun sets
ten thousand times.

Long ago I was drafted by the army and two years later was discharged. I spent that time counting pages in unused obsolete code books before the books were shredded and burned. That service was much more rewarding than this farce of jury duty.

White Rock Canyon: Closer and Closer

Bandelier National Monument
Frijoles Canyon
As seen from La Caja del Rio, Santa Fe National Forest

White Rock Canyon cliff face from top to bottom.
Jemez Mountains in the distance seen across Bandelier.

The topo map was helpful. I got pretty close this time, across the Rio Grande from Bandelier with a nice view of Frijoles Canyon. Years ago I hiked down that canyon from the park headquarters and it was beautiful but the view of the cliff face is much better from this side.

There was a bonus. When I got near to the end of the trail I found an archaeological site, a mound that was once a pueblo with a beautiful view. I found a pot shard and tool cores made from what appeared to me to be glassy rhyolite. They helped me identify the mound as a site, but the main reason I knew it was a ruin was the Forest Service sign saying "Please do not deface this archaeological site." The site seemed untouched but the sign was defaced.

This was a very enjoyable hike but I am sure I can do better. Surely I can find the abrupt edge I imagine and I can peer over the 1,000 foot drop and see the Rio Grande at the bottom of the banded tuff cliffs.

I'd show you where I hiked but that would give away the location of the protected archaeology site
and since it's not marked on any maps, I'll not mark it here.
You'll have to find it yourself.
It should be easy to find yourself a site: there are a lot of them.
Just look for a mound covered with cholla.

White Rock Canyon walls with Los Alamos and LANL once again in the background.

La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs

A few miles southwest of Santa Fe is the La Cieneguilla Petroglyph site. Above a long abandoned pueblo Indians pecked several hundred images into the basalt cliffs of La Bajada. An archeologist we found examing a spiral hidden under tumbleweeds told us the Indians were active in the area from the 12th thru the 17th century. As we walked along a steep bolder strewn "trail" just under the cliff top, we saw images of birds, coyotes, deer, kokopellis and horses. We did about half the route before heat overtook us. It will be cooler in October and we'll have to return to see the rest of the trail.

German Double Eagle ??

Falling Man and Thunderstorm ??

A randy Kokopelli
Musicians will always be musicians

A fish?
Almost all petroglyphs are pecked on flat surfaces
This is on the corner of a rock. 3-D.
Makes me think this could be a modern forgery.