Tag Archives: hiking in New Mexico

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Hidden Honey

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Wild BeehiveThe dry stream bed we followed left the sandstone and entered a twisted granite canyon, narrow and deep-shaded. A barn owl startled and flew, soft clop of wings. High on the canyonside was its nest hole, the entryway streaked with mutes. Striations on the roof of it were the weathered wattles of a wild beehive, the remaining honey cells like waxy lace.

That hive was abandoned. But when we dug at a damp place in the sand, water welled up and thirsty bees came clustering. Somewhere in that canyon there is a hidden hive.

 

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Uncategorized, Walking All Day On Stone

Visions

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CabezonFrom the western ridge of the syncline a pass looks out over Cabezón, shadowy and shadow-washed. Many ancient, rudimentary stone circles scatter their boulders on high points. Each may be the site of a vision quest; we can think of no other explanation. Below lie mineral springs. One is raised on its deposits, a breast whose nipple is a pool, perfectly round, green as an old penny.

As we walked back along the ridge, some small creature far down among the split rocks screamed at us: Squee! Squee! Squee! An ear-splitting insult that never stopped until we went away.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

In Just Spring

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HornyToad4 DB128A tiny harlequein horned toad with reddish body, gray legs and stripy gray tail. Was it so variegated because it lived among multicolored gravels? It was barely the size of a quarter.

Later in the day we came upon truly horny horned toads, a mating pair. The female was fat and tan, the male slender and ash-colored. When we came close to look they fled, but they fled together. The male, even in fear, followed the female and would not lose her.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Unforced

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Boots 2014-02-24 cropPenistaja Mesa, tohellandgone west of Cuba. Cabezón dim and blue on the horizon. Tertiary strata, sometimes black with almost-coal. Everywhere petrified wood: enormous whole logs weathering into chips, as though we walked through slash left by a mad stone woodcutter.

Penistaja is probably a corruption of the Navajo binishdaahi’, “I forced him to sit.” So we sat.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Wilderness First Aid

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Wilderness first aidTo the Ojito Wilderness with a friend and his big German shepherd,  Chaco. Not thirty yards from the car, Chaco joyfully jumped me. I tried to yank my hands out of the pockets of my $2.50 Goodwill vest to fend him off. It tore, and clouds of duckie down floated away on the wind.

We patched the rips with radiator hose repair tape and Band-aids.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Hard Times

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TwoTrackDB124Arroyo de la Caña. A small, gray-tan bobcat caught by its hind leg in a “legal” trap. Not much bigger than a house cat. It growled at us in a singsong. We came as close as we dared.  One of us—not wise to the strength and wildness of bobcats—wanted to throw a coat over it and try to release it, in spite of its broken leg.

As we hiked away a fierce-faced, bearded man drove up in a big pickup. Bobcat skulls, and probably skins, bring a price. I’m not sure how much, but New Mexico is very poor.

On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Holy Water

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Shrine Cebolla Wilderness 1In the Cebolla Wilderness, an abandoned ranchito with tin shack and corrals. North of it was a steep, stone arroyo with a spring at its head. Filling the gap between two huge stones, a springhouse had been built around the frozen pool. Inside, back in the dark and the smell of water, a tiny shrine was cut in the living rock.

The chisel marks were clear. The santo that had stood there was gone, as was the grille that had protected it, though the scars of the grille’s hinges remained. The empty nicho was touched with blue paint. Carved in front of it was a shallow bowl—for a votive candle, or for water from the spring? There was a stone  to kneel on.

The dim interior, the narrow rock passage and frozen pool, the tiny shrine: it felt like a megalithic tomb, something much older than itself.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Rock and a Hard Place

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Hiker & mesaBushwhacking near the Continental Divide Trail. Broken land: stone, mud, sand, concretions. Overall colors are dun, but sometimes, bright against the yellow, a deep red or black. Weathered, skeletal, not a land friendly to humans. No water but the distant Puerco River. Sagebrush and juniper—the piñon is dead from drought.

The particular crisp softness of walking on frost-heaved Cretaceous dirt.

A doe and her grown fawn floated away from us, bouncing light as…but nothing bounces light as a deer.
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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Room with a View

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Sheepherder shelterWarm sun, nippy wind. Socks full of stickers, had to stop every quarter mile to pick them out.

North of Stud Stallion Wash we crossed the pitted sandstone to the ridge. Tucked in a cliff face below a little ponderosa and above a cluster of dry tinajas—natural rain catchment tanks—we came upon what was probably a nineteenth-century sheepherder’s hole-up.

It was a smoke-blackened rock shelter partly enclosed by a stone windbreak. Cozy place. You could spread your skimpy bedroll behind the stone wall and look out over the wide saddle of the syncline with its mysterious stone circles and prehistoric deer-hunter meadows and, at night, a field of stars.

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On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Strange Beach

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GrassDB131Season of dry grasses.

The road turned to dirt, then to a two-track that petered out and became a trail. Two young buck deer moved away from us quietly, up the far side of the draw. Two-year-old males: Jan calls them “forkéd horns.”

On a pumice outcropping lay, face down, a Surfer Ken doll in board shorts that had once been blue and yellow. I turned him face up, to catch some rays and even out his tan.

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