Jane and I hit the road, heading south with Santa Fe plugged in as our destination. True to form for New Mexico in late summer, the cloud cover broke apart rapidly, leaving behind only puffy picturesque clouds in an azure sky. The plains sprawled out before us and around us, interrupted only by the sunflower-lined road cutting a winding track through them. A cool, crisp breeze whipped through Jane’s window, bringing with it the scent of the distant mountains. It’s times like this that I wonder why I don’t live here. Surely, if I did, it would be impossible to ever have a bad day.
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| A tiny horned lizard! |
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| Metamorphosed boulders! |
But as I approached the top of the ridge, the thunder started to roll. I pulled up the weather radar to look at the afternoon storm systems, kind of eyeballed their distance from me compared to my distance from the mountaintop, and concluded… that I would not make it to the top without getting hit by lightning. Lightning really doesn’t mess around out here, you know. That was something I had to learn after living on the East Coast all my life, where lightning is fairly innocuous – out West, lightning is deadly, especially if you’re on a high point.
So, in an attempt to not invite too much disaster (you know, only a little disaster instead), I poked around the trail system below the ridgeline about halfway down the slope. I kind of just had the wiggles after driving for two days, so I was really very interested in staying out and walking around more. And that’s how I ended up drenched as the storm bands hit, exactly as my weather radar app had predicted. Hmm. It was kind of scenic, though.
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| The rain bands coming in |
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| View towards town through the rain - not raining yet in the valley! |
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| A nice wet folded crinkly rock |
When I had had enough of that, I headed back down the
hill to the trailhead to collect an equally-soaked Jane. No problem, of course.
At least, there wasn’t a problem until I got onto the roads in the eastern
hills of Santa Fe. I then found out that the eastern hills of Santa Fe flood
very badly when it rains and the roads turn into impromptu floodways. So, I
once again played the game that I always seem to be playing with Jane in
mid-August: the “is this puddle/stream/river shallow enough to drive through
without flooding my car?” game. Ugh!
I made it down into town without mishap and checked in at my hotel, where I laid on the bed being cold and sopping wet for a while until common sense and the heater both kicked in. I kind of figured that I was done for the night, given the size of the rainstorms passing through, but things cleared up pretty substantially at 5 PM and I suddenly found my motivation again!
I went for an early dinner across the street – New Mexican
Christmas-style enchiladas finished off with a round of sopapillas, of course –
and then decided to go on another hike! This was generally a terrible idea as I
was now full of enchiladas and sopapillas. But, whatever.
I headed back towards the east side of town, determined
to find a trail that would give me (hopefully) nice sunset views over Santa Fe.
Those spectacular New Mexican clouds were back again, and I was kind of hoping
that they would stick around.
This time, I opted to tackle the Atalaya Trail, another popular
trek on the eastern side of town. It’s quite a hike up the mountain (if you’re
full of food, at least, maybe not so much if you’re not) but I had my second
wind and I got up into the hills in short order. There wasn’t too much to see
on the way up, beyond some pink flowers that were nicely lit in the golden
hour.
At any rate, I’m really glad that I hoofed it, because I
found a hidden overlook that proved to be a perfect spot to witness a truly
spectacular sunset. The clouds had stuck around just as I’d hoped, creating a
dramatic patchwork of blues and grays across the vast skies. As the sun slipped
low on the horizon towards the distant mountains, its rays caught the remnants
of the rains on the far side of town, refracting explosively and bathing the
landscape in a brilliant crimson.
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| Too many photos of the same sunset? No such thing! |
Standing up there in my secluded hollow, witnessing this incredible display, I found time to once again consider how lucky I am to get to experience things like this. It is sad to me to think that many people will never witness this raw beauty, will never experience the real scope of the world and discover how small they really are. But I guess they don’t know what they’re missing. Me, I know what I’m missing when I’m all holed up in my nice snug house in the city, so I watched the sun set wistfully, knowing that it’ll be one of the last truly stellar “wide-open” sunsets I’ll see for a long time. Tomorrow I’ll head on into West Texas, and the day after that I’ll be home in Austin. Moments like these on the tail end of trips are always bittersweet, but I cherish them more for it.
Kelly signing out.
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