Looking north into the Valle Grande from the Coyote Call Trail

The winter light is so beautiful here in northern New Mexico that every weekend calls out for a walk somewhere in the country. This weekend was no exception, and that intriguing volcanic range on Santa Fe’s western skyline, the Jemez Mountains, was particularly seductive – the range catches snow as if to cool down its hot and turbulent past, and the great caldera in its heart, with its vast meadows, simply radiates light on a clear winter day.

Much of this range is protected now by the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Under the terms of its establishment with the Federal Government, the preserve must attempt to pay for itself through a variety of services to the public. There’s no charge to drive though it, but it is not a National Park – yet – and you generally can’t go hiking just anywhere you like without making arrangements and paying a small fee. There are, however, some short and delightful trails on its perimeter that are free, and a friend and I decided to check out one we’d driven past many time before – the Coyote Call Trail.

This is a popular trail for viewing elk, of which the preserve has an enormous population, and in the winter it makes a wonderful loop for snowshoeing or cross-country skiing. Openings in the forest give views north of the Valle Grande and its crown of volcanic domes:

At one time this vast meadow held a crater lake, and today, its dense lake-bed soil and the fact that the basin traps cold air inhibits the encroachment of the forests on the surrounding mountains. Small creeks wind their way across the Valles, meandering in a lazy way until they find exit through the rugged lavas to the southwest. These are buried in ice and snow now, although we did see one ponded spring, apparently fed by volcanically-heated water, covered in happy waterfowl.

This trail just cries out for a saucer sled, to speed you back to your car:

Views through the trees on the east end of the trail (where we were stopped by uncompacted snow) show the Sierras de los Valles that cradle the Valle on its east side, and form the western backdrop to Los Alamos on the other side:

As you can see, this ridge has been severely burned by the Las Conchas Fire, the largest of all the fires that ravished New Mexico this spring. There’s very little of this loop that hasn’t been scorched, so if you are wanting to visit a verdant forest this summer, this walk isn’t for you. It’s still beautiful in the winter, and the animals haven’t forsaken it:

Sketching odd animal tracks on the snow

There are plenty of untouched groves that will seed future growth:

A pristine aspen grove

And the views are marvelous. Look how small the Valle Preserve Staging Area – the visitor’s center just right of the La Jara dome – looks, swallowed up by the snowy meadow:

The smallest lava dome in the Preserve, with the Staging Area to its right

Oh – we did see a coyote. He wasn’t on the trail – he was out in the Valle Grande hunting rodents under the snow – but I wanted to mention it. These mountains never fail to hand you a wildlife encounter.

View through a clearing

A natural sculpture of fire and ice

The vast and beautiful Galisteo Basin, south of Santa Fe

After a rather turbulent early spring with freezing nights, cold winds, and almost no moisture, the days are finally warming up here in Santa Fe. It has looked like spring since mid-April, but it certainly hasn’t felt like it. But now May has arrived and the sun is beginning to triumph, and the west wind can bring a sudden taste of the desert to the city. If you’re here for a visit conditions couldn’t be nicer. (If you’re trying to get the garden started, you may have another opinion).

It’s always important to take a break from washing windows and putting up the screens and getting the soaker hoses laid in the vegetable patch, and on Sunday a friend and I drove about 16 miles south and east of Santa Fe to check out the relatively undiscovered Galisteo Basin Preserve. We took along a picnic lunch rather than the usual backpack fare:

Picnic under a grizzled old juniper

One can be civilized even in the Wild West.

The Galisteo Basin is a basin in two senses of the word. Geographically it looks like a basin: a vast open bowl of juniper-grassland with pinon-dotted hills, surrounded by blue ridges of low mountains. No canyons gash its gentle lines. The surrounding highlands give it a protected feel, unlike the exposed and open spaces of the Great Plains further east. People feel comfortable here. There are old villages like charming little Galisteo, and modern housing developments of an open plan are springing up, and no doubt there are ancient pueblos hidden from view by the passage of time.

Geologically the Galisteo Basin is a basin as well. When the Rocky Mountains were first born around 65 million years ago, the uplifts of ancient continental crust were paired with areas of subsidence that received the sediment shed from the growing highlands. The birth of the modern Rockies is called the Laramide Orogeny by the geological crowd, and the Galisteo Basin is a classic Laramide Basin. The climate was warm and mild in those days, subtropical with moisture blown in from the Pacific, unblocked by the Sierra Nevada (or for that matter any of California, which hadn’t been assembled yet) and rivers, lavish by our current New Mexico standards, brought plenty of mud, sand, and gravel down from the verdant new Sangre de Cristo. You can still find fossilized palm logs in the tiny riverbed of Galisteo Creek.

Conditions are much different now. We’re high and dry, and there’s not a palm tree to be seen:

The view southwest from our picnic

As more people move into this pleasant part of New Mexico, efforts are being made to preserve the Basin’s viewscape, and to give opportunity for public access and recreation.

A good example of sensitive multiple-use planning

Although our picnic was nice, gusty and nonstop winds brought on by afternoon warming put just a few too many positive ions into the air for human pleasure, and neither one of us felt like lingering after our repast. But the views were wonderful and the break in routine welcome, and no doubt we’ll be back out this way on a calmer day, to explore the trails so carefully laid out in this beautiful piece of the Old West.

The view back toward Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

Getting there:

The Galisteo Basin Preserve is south and east of Santa Fe, off of State Road 285, about 16 miles from town. 285 leaves Interstate 25 east of Santa Fe, after about 9 miles, and heads south through the planned community of Eldorado. The unpaved pullout to the Galisteo Natural Preserve can be found just off to the right of 285 very shortly after you cross the rail spur that cuts across the road (clearly signed with overhead signals). The entrance to the Preserve is also signed.

A link to activities.

A walk with Dad at Bandelier National Monument, not far from Santa Fe

Santa Fe is a wonderful destination for kids of all ages, but when the younger ones come along, sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to find something that will engage them in new ways. Art galleries and elegant restaurants only go so far with this crowd! But we have the perfect solution for you: Bandelier National Monument. What child can fail to be fascinated by kid-sized caves dug out of towering cliffs and entered by ladders?

What's in here?

Just about the right height for me!

Bandelier’s cliffs and towering Ponderosa pines are tall enough to make anyone feel like a child:

Investigating cliff dwellings along the Long House Trail

And it only gets better. You won’t be able to keep the monkey-bar set off the 140 feet of ladders up to the Ceremonial Cave!

Let's go!

A triumphant ascent

Budding photographers – even the young cynical ones – will find plenty of subject matter in Bandelier:

Hunting down the devil squirrel

The thing about a family vacation is, you never know when the magical moment will arrive. This is all so b o o o r r i n g – until it isn’t:

Whoa!

OMG! Did you see that? She was coming right for me!

So don’t hesitate to bring your family out our way. We’ll send you off for all sorts of adventures.

On to the next stop!

Getting there:

The National Park Service has this useful link giving directions to the Monument from Santa Fe and Taos: Getting There. It’s just shy of an hour’s drive from the Inn on the Alameda, and much of the drive – especially the part from the Pueblo of Pojoaque to the park – is especially beautiful. You might want to leave some time for a drive up over the mountain to the Valle Grande National Preserve – it’s only about a half-hour’s drive west of Bandelier – and you can always make a stop in Los Alamos on your way back to Santa Fe, where there’s a free museum: the Bradbury Science Museum, a very kid-friendly bookstore: the Otowi Station, and most importantly, a Starbucks. With bathrooms.

Gambel Oak leaves in autumn light

Deer photographs courtesy of Britt Renbarger. Your uncle thanks you.

Hiking in the Pecos Wilderness

Autumn has to be the best time to take walks and hikes in the Southern Rockies. The weather is mild, the sunshine glorious, and the inconvenience of an afternoon thunderstorm minimized. The aspen put on their annual fall spectacular – they’re at their peak here on the Santa Fe side of the mountains – and the plants on the floor of the forest take on all sorts of autumnal colors, in counterpoint to the mostly yellow leaves of the aspen. Our forests are relatively dry and radiant with light, especially this time of year, and the intense sunshine distills seductive aromatics from the aspen leaves and spruce needles, to the point where you may find yourself drifting down the trail in an almost blissed-out state.

Unfortunately there is so much else going on here in Northern New Mexico that you may find trouble budgeting for a walk, with all the choices you’ll have to make. I’m thinking particularly of the wonderful artist studio tours which occur on practically every weekend now. That’s my excuse, anyway, for the brevity of this week’s entry, as well as my choice for a hike: the Pecos Studio Tour opened this past weekend, and there was an artist a friend of mine simply had to see. Studio tours are great. Not only do you get to talk to the artist in his or her natural habitat, you get to poke your nose in peoples’ gardens and kitchens and studios and bedrooms, and meet their dogs, cats, parrots, goats, turtles, doves, etc, etc, and see how they’ve rigged their water catchment systems, and so on. Fascinating!

Anyway, being in the Pecos area, which is the gateway to the enormous Pecos Wilderness just to the north and east of Santa Fe, a drive north up to Cowles – the jumping off spot for hikes and trail rides deep into the wilderness – immediately suggested itself. There wasn’t time for a long hike, and it’s a 20 mile drive from Pecos back in to Cowles, so we chose a relatively short two-mile walk up Panchuela and Cave Creeks, to see the little caves for which the creek is named. Caves have a sort of elemental attraction to geologists and nature mystics, and they aren’t all that common in our part of the state, so off we went.

The first cave entrance along Cave Creek

The trailhead for this hike is clearly marked at the end of the Panchuela campground just above Cowles – here is a link for the trail you can print – and at least for the first two miles to the caves it’s an easy walk with a gentle increase in elevation. In another two miles or so, the trail leaves the creek and makes a steep climb out of the drainage and up onto the soft flattened summits of the thickly wooded mesas that characterize the southern part of the wilderness. If you have any energy – and time – left after this ascent, you can follow a branch of the trail into the uplift of granite that forms the backbone of the Santa Fe Range, and switchback up to Lake Johnson, one of the least visited of the glacial lakes in the wilderness.

But that’s for another time. The caves make a perfect place to stop and have a snack, and maybe pull out the nature journal for a sketch or two:

Yours truly in front of the mountain's nostrils

The gentler parts of the Pecos Wilderness are cut out of a vast thickness of Pennsylvanian strata deposited back when Santa Fe sat nearly on the Equator, and blue mountains shimmered in the hot sun above glittering inlets of a tropical sea. Layer upon layer of sand – some of it coarse and pebbly – and mud accumulated in the shallow water, washed out of an early edition of the Rocky Mountains called the “Ancestral Rockies“. During those times when the water clarified, limy beds  - many full of fossilized brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoans, and horn corals – interpolated themselves between the soon-to-be sandstones and shales. It is in a rather crinkly bedded cliff of these limestones that the caves occur.  The creek crowds up against the ledge, and disappears into pits that have formed like dental cavities right at the gum line, so to speak, of the limestone. (Limestone is a rock that is soluble in the slightly acidic groundwater of a forest floor and hence prone to cave-forming.)

When it dawns on you that the merry sound of the creek you’ve been following for a mile has stopped, and when you realize you are now walking along a suspiciously dry creek bed, it is time to start looking for the caves. You’ll find them on the left side of the trail, up against the cliffs, just about the time you hear water gurgling again.

Even without these mysterious entrances to the underworld to entice you along, Cave Creek makes a nice walk.

A little waterfall on Panchuela Creek along the way

Judging by all the rose hips and iris stalks along the trails, this canyon must be an absolute garden of wildflowers in early summer. Plenty of water pours down Panchuela and Cave Creeks, even at this dry time of year, and that always makes for a pleasant walk in the summer and fall. We were a little early for the aspen on this side of the range:

A grove of aspen just beginning to turn

In another week these trees will be dazzling. On our side of the mountains, up at Aspen Vista and Big Tesuque, the trees are at their peak of color, and I can’t wait to get up there. That is, if I can tear myself away from the Pilar Studio Tour, and the Farmer’s Market, and the train ride down to Albuquerque, and the newly restored CCC Visitor’s Center at Bandelier, and . .

Getting there:

There are several ways of accessing the Pecos Wilderness from Santa Fe, as you can see here. Read up on “access from the south” for this hike. Just as you reach the tiny town of Cowles, you’ll see a bridge crossing over the Pecos River, which you’ll take, followed by a very sharp right uphill on the narrow road to the Panchuela Campground. It’s about a mile and a half from the turning. Be sure and bring $2 to pay the day use fee to park at the campground.

We didn’t think to bring a flashlight, but you can scramble into the caves a short distance. I have to mention that water drains freely into the entrances, which looked clogged and muddy a short way in and not inviting at all. I recommend staying outside in the sunshine.

Like all trails in the Pecos Wilderness, you may be sharing with horses and their riders. Pack rides and overnighters are very popular here. Just be ready to step aside for a short while as the riders pass.