The Road North (Part 1)

…runs through New Mexico. In late August, I left Loreto in Baja California Sur and drove 1,100 miles to Taos where Rande had spent the summer. Our plan was to drive to Whidbey Island in northern Puget Sound to visit her family, but first I had to deal with an ear problem. On what turned out to be my last dive of the summer in the Sea of Cortés, I had what diver’s call reverse squeeze – a sharp pain in one ear as I returned to the surface. I couldn’t equalize (reduce) the air pressure in my ear with the pressure of the surrounding water. 

Rio Grande south of Taos, New Mexico

The next day, I went to the emergency clinic in Loreto and learned that I had an infection in one ear. The doctor, a young woman who spoke some English, gave me a prescription for antibiotic ear drops and told me to stay out of the water for two weeks. My summer of diving was over. Before leaving Mexico, I made an appointment online for an ear specialist in northern New Mexico. When I arrived at his office in Taos a week later, the infection was gone, but he sent me to a clinic in Los Alamos to test for a tear in the eardrum. They pressurized the outer ear and waited; a decline in pressure indicates a tear. I passed the test; I could go back in the water.

Cemetery in Llano Quemado 

Rande is strongly attracted to the culture, history and landscape of northern New Mexico; it’s where she wants to live. After more than two years of traveling and living out of a truck, she wants a home base – a place for our things, where friendships last more than a couple months. We’ve camped and hiked in northern New Mexico since the 1980s, and we lived in the Jemez Mountains west of Los Alamos for two years when I worked at Valles Caldera National Preserve (now part of Bandelier National Monument, where she worked as a contractor).

Abandoned cabin west of Taos

Northern New Mexico has two drawbacks for me: the winters are cold and there's no diving. Her answer is two houses – one in New Mexico and one in Baja. I too would like to have a home base somewhere sometime in the future, but maintaining one house, let alone two, would limit our flexibility to drop everything and set off traveling for long periods. We’re working on a compromise; we decided to put off buying a house until after we return from our next trip abroad, but she’s watching the real estate market around Santa Fe.

Llamas grazing on open range west of Taos

During our discussions about places to live, Rande pointed out that I took more pictures when I was in northern New Mexico than anywhere else. I’m drawn to the many photographic opportunities – wide vistas and multi-colored mesas capped with towering thunderheads of the summer monsoon, isolated villages with thick-walled adobe buildings, abandoned homesteads and vehicles, steep canyons carved by rivers and forests of yellow aspens in the fall.

North House of Taos Pueblo

The landscapes and resources of the Rio Grande Valley attracted nomadic hunters (Paleo-Indians) for thousands of years. As the environment became drier about 8,000 years ago, inhabitants of the Southwest became more dependent on gathering native plants and began to develop agriculture and experiment with village life (Desert-Archaic Culture). About 2,000 years ago, the Ancestral Puebloans established villages, took up agriculture, acquired more possessions, developed basket-making to an art and constructed "stunning prehistoric communities." They greeted the Spanish in the 16th century and their descendants and culture survive today (link).

Houses in Taos Pueblo

Pueblo de Taos was built between the late 13th and early 14th centuries and is one of the oldest continuously-inhabited communities in the U.S. It is on the National Register of Historic Places (link). In 1992, it was listed as a World Heritage Site (link) as a "...remarkable example of a traditional type of architecture ensemble from the pre-Hispanic period of the Americas unique to this region and one which, because of the living culture of its community, has successfully retained most of its traditional forms..." (link). 

Cemetery in Taos Pueblo

Taos Pueblo dogs

As I selected photos for this post, I realized that some were based on my familiarity with the landscape. Usually, the images I use to illustrate our travels are those that catch a traveler’s eye – first impressions. Some of the subjects here, like abandoned buildings, cemeteries and old vehicles, also appear in my travel photos. According to Freeman Patterson (Photography & the art of seeing), “The camera always points both ways. In expressing the subject, you also express yourself.” Landscapes can be evocative (intriguing, mysterious, contemplative, etc.) to the photographer and the viewer. A bright blue sky creates a sense of optimism; a dark, overcast sky can be moody or threatening. Subjects like abandoned vehicles and buildings under an overcast sky suggest melancholy. Lakes with a mirror surface and streams blurred by a slow shutter speed suggest tranquility. Wide vistas with a distant vanishing point can evoke the insignificance of man.

Rio Grande rift valley south of Taos (Taos Plateau)

The Rio Grande rift zone extends from central Colorado to the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico. It averages 30 miles wide and separates the Colorado Plateau to the west from the Great Plains to the east. Evolution of the rift was complex, but about 35 million years ago the earth's crust began to pull apart (extend); crustal thinning allowed magma to reach the surface as volcanic eruptions, the most recent of which occurred in south-central New Mexico about 5,400 years ago. The crust under the rift is about 19-22 miles thick, 6-10 miles thinner than the crust under the Colorado Plateau and the Great Plains (link).

Bridge across the Rio Grande Gorge west of Taos in early morning

The Rio Grande Gorge bridge was begun in 1963 and completed in 1965. It is 1,280 feet long and 565 feet high. It is the seventh highest bridge in the U.S. (link) and is on the National Register of Historic Places (link). 

The 800-foot deep Rio Grande Gorge south of the gorge bridge

The Rio Grande flows 1,800 miles from its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado through New Mexico and forms the border between Texas and Mexico before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Crossing the 700-mile length of New Mexico, the river is the major drainage feature of New Mexico.

Desert bighorn sheep (males) in the Rio Grande Gorge

Three bridges cross the Rio Grande near Taos: the high bridge on U.S. 64 west of Taos; the John Dunn Bridge near Arroyo Hondo north of Taos; and Taos Junction Bridge near Pilar south of Taos. 

John Dunn Bridge near Arroyo Hondo

Seventy-four miles of the Rio Grande within the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument (link) are classified as a Wild and Scenic River (link). 

House in Arroyo Hondo beneath the Sangre de Christos Mountains

House and descanso near Peñasco

Earthships are passive solar houses made from natural and recycled materials (link). There's an village on the Taos Plateau west of Taos off U.S. Hwy. 64 where people have built dozens of earthship s off the grid. Earthship Biotecture offers tours and rentals for the curious, and classes for those who want to learn how to build one (link).

Earthships west of Taos

Open range sign along U.S. Hwy 64 west of Taos decorated with a spaceship and bullet hole

Descansos are memorials placed along highways at the site of a tragic, violent death. I wrote about them in a 2013 post (link). They're common in Latin America and the southwestern U.S. I'm reluctant to call the cross of diminutive liquor bottles surrounding a truck hubcap a descanso (below) – there's no explicit memorialization – but it is creative.

Memorial near Taos

The story of fire in the southwestern U.S. is long and complicated. Forests like Ponderosa pine evolved with fire and depend on it to maintain themselves. A century of suppressing fires and overgrazing has increased forest fuel loads and allowed invasive plants to become widespread. Droughts and a warming climate weaken trees and foster population explosions of destructive beetles. As a result, forest fires now are larger, more intense and more destructive. The U.S. Forest Service spends 50% of its annual budget on fighting wildfires (link). The expanding human population living in or near forests puts property and lives of firefighters and residents at risk, increasing the need for forest thinning and prescribed burns. 

Smoke from a prescribed burn on the Carson National Forest west of Taos blocks out the setting sun

Ranching has a long history in New Mexico. The first horses and sheep came to the area with Coronado in 1540. In 1598, Juan de Onate won a contract to settle New Mexico and brought with him, in addition to 400 colonists, 1,300 cows, steers, bulls and calves as well as goats, sheep, mules and oxen, but the cattle industry would remain primitive until after the U.S. annexed New Mexico in 1848. Ranching was dominated by sheep until after the Civil War when cattlemen were attracted to the vast unoccupied grazing lands (link). 

Ranch on Coyote Creek near Guadalupita

Abandoned ranch near Dixon

The Mabel Dodge Luhan house in Taos was listed as a National Historic Landmark for its architecture and association with literature. Mabel Dodge was born in Buffalo, NY in 1879 to a wealthy family. She had been married three times and held "evening salons for artistic and literary figures" in Florence and New York, including Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Margret Sanger (birth control activist), Emma Goldman (radical anarchist) and Isadora Duncan, by the time she arrived in Santa Fe in 1917 (link). 

 

Mabel Dodge Luhan's Big House in Taos

She became friends with Antonio (Tony) Luhan at Taos Pueblo in 1918, the year her then husband and painter, Maurice Sterne, left Taos; they were later divorced. Tony Luhan convinced Mabel to buy 12 acres of land adjacent to the pueblo and oversaw construction of her house, which was completed in 1922. She and Luhan were the architects of the Big House, which "blended Pueblo, Colonial and Tuscan architectural elements." They were married in 1923 (link).

Mabel Dodge Luhan house

D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, Willa Cather, Ansel Adams and Dorothy Brett (English artist) stayed with Mabel Dodge Luhan in the 1920s. D.H. Lawrence lived in the Pink House across the field from the Big House. Mabel gave Lawrence the Kiowa Ranch north of Taos and Frieda paid here with a hand-written copy of Sons and Lovers. Willa Cather wrote Death comes for the Archbishop in the Big House. After Lawrence's death in 1930, Mabel wrote a series of memoirs, including Lorenzo in Taos about her relationship with Lawrence. She continued as the "Grand Dame" of Taos until her death in 1962; Tony Luhan died shortly thereafter (link, link). 

Mabel Dodge Luhan house interior

The house was sold to Dennis Hopper, who directed and starred in the iconic American movie Easy Rider, in 1970. He turned the Big House into a commune. The house is now owned by the Attiyeh Foundation and is operated as an inn and conference center (link). 

Mabel Dodge Luhan house interior with Dennis Hopper's picture (upper left)

The 160-acre Lawrence Ranch is located at 8,600 feet near the village of San Cristobal north of Taos. D.H. and Freida Lawrence lived in the Homesteader's Cabin and Dorothy Brett lived in a smaller cabin nearby. D.H. Lawrence only spent 11 months on three visits to the ranch in 1924 and 1925, but said New Mexico had changed him forever (link, link).

Homesteader's Cabin on the Lawrence Ranch

Interior of the Homesteader's Cabin

D,H. Lawrence died in France in 1930; Frieda had his body exhumed and Angelo Ravagli, Freida's lover, brought his ashes to New Mexico. Ravagli designed and built the memorial in 1934 and Frieda mixed Lawrence's ashes into the cement that made the alter. The Phoenix above the altar, a symbol of immortality, was Lawrence's personal totem. The window above the Phoenix was painted by Dorothy Brett. Frieda died in 1954 and left the ranch to the University of New Mexico provided they maintained a perpetual memorial to D.H. Lawrence (link, link). Another version of the story of Lawrence's ashes had Ravagli dumping them in France to "save complications with customs," which he told after Frieda's death (link).

D.H. Lawrence memorial built in 1934

Georgia O'Keeffe stayed at the Lawrence Ranch, but never met D.H. Lawrence. She would lie on a bench under a large Pondersoa pine outside the Homesteader's Cabin looking up through the branches to the sky. Lawrence wrote at a small table under the tree. O'Keeffe's 1929 painting, The Lawrence Tree (link), shows the nighttime sky as dark blue and speckled with stars (link).

The Lawrence tree in daytime

After 1934, Georgia O'Keefe spent summers at Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch north of Abiquiu. In 1940, she bought an adobe house and seven acres on the property. She spent winters in New York and later, after Alfred Steiglitz died, in Abiquiu where she bought a house in 1945 (link).

Ghost Ranch

Each year, as many as 40,000 people visit El Santuario de Chimayó at Easter. Some make a pilgrimage walk that can be many miles and some carry wooden crosses that they leave on the church grounds. They walk to express their culture and beliefs, to give thanks, and to ask for divine intervention (link; link).

El Santuario de Chimayó (1813)

Cemetery in Chimayó

Church of San Jose de Garcia in Las Trampas (1760), a National Historic Landmark

San Rafael Church (1865, restored 1990) in La Cueva

St. Vrain's flour mill (1860s) on the Mora River in La Cueva Historic District

At 8,000 feet on the "High Road" between Santa Fe and Taos, Truchas is one of the highest towns in New Mexico. It was founded in 1754 as a Spanish land grant (link). The original town was 70 yards outside dimension with an exterior wall, an interior plaza and one entrance. Truchas (Spanish for trout) was built on a ridge as an outpost between Spanish settlements in the river valleys and marauding groups of Plains and Pueblo Indians. The town did not have electricity and running water until around 1950. In 1776 there were 26 families and 122 people (link); in 2015 there were 539 people (link).

The village of Truchas below Truchas Peak (13,100 ft)

Building in Truchas

Abandoned adobe building

Abandoned vehicles are common in northern New Mexico. They were kept for parts or left where they died.

Abandoned car near Peñasco

Automobile junk yard in Questa

Mack trucks in Cimarron

Black-billed magpies symbolize the Intermountain West to me. I've seen them from Montana to New Mexico, from high deserts to mountains, from ranch lands to cities. They're smart, loud, social and aggressive. In Taos, adults from neighboring nests commingled their fledglings while they foraged for food and harassed the local cats.

Black-billed magpie feeding its fledgling in Taos

Valle Vidal (Valley of Life) is a 102,000-acre unit of the Carson National Forest in the northern Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains northwest of Cimarron. Elevations range from 7,700 to 12,600 feet. Valle Vidal is popular with fishermen, hunters, equestrians and campers, and can be accessed on an all-weather dirt road by most vehicles, although the road is closed during elk-calving season (link). The land was donated to the United States by the Penzoil Company in 1982 (link). 

Valle Vidal with Wheeler Peak, the highest point in New Mexico (13,161 ft), in the distance

Ponderosa pine tree in Valle Vidal lost its top, probably to lightning

We left Taos following the Rio Grande north to the San Luis Valley, a large, high-altitude basin filled with unconsolidated alluvial sediments in the Rio Grande Rift Zone in south-central Colorado.  At an average elevation of 7,664 feet, it has short, mild summers and cold winters (link).

Cottonwoods and fall snow storm near San Luis, Colorado

Bordering the San Luis Valley on the east, Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is the fourth highest peak (14,351 feet) in the Rocky Mountains. To the Navajo, it is the Sacred Mountain of the East and the eastern boundary of their traditional homeland. The 1.8-billion-year-old granite Blanca massif rises 7,000 feet above the San Luis Valley (link). 

Blanca massif above the San Luis Valley of south-central Colorado

Leaving the San Luis Valley on US Highway 160, we climbed east over La Veta Pass (9,400 feet) across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to Walsenberg where we picked up Interstate 25, which took us to northern Colorado and the storage units where our household goods are stored. There we traded light-weight summer clothes for heavier winter clothes and continued on our way north to Washington.

Beaver pond near La Veta Pass in southern Colorado

Freeman Patterson. 1979. Photography & the art of seeing. Van Nostrand Reinhold Ltd., Toronto. 156 pp.