Today's Adventure at 8000 Feet

By calling today's outing an adventure, I certainly don't mean to imply that anything particularly exciting happened when we went up to the Lincoln National Forest this morning. The exciting thing to me is that we continue to include some form of exercise in our daily routine.

Today's goal was to walk and bike in the thin air at 8000 feet up. After Beez set out on his bike, I followed on foot. This is little Weetzie, my excellent hiking companion. We headed up (why is it always up?) this logging road, keeping a careful eye out for lovely deer and fierce, protective, and combative mother bears. 

At one point, Weetzie made an unexpectedly loud snuffly noise which made my hair literally stand up all over my head. Once I had ascertained that no mother bears were charging, we decided to wander back down the road toward the car, my chair, and a book for some nice forest-y contemplation. 

Looking closely at the ground, we could see that there were tiny little wildflowers, which you will hardly be able to make out in these iPhone photos I took. In my defense, I have a very difficult time making out what I am taking a photo of when then sun is shining on the screen. But, oh dear, I do wish they would be in focus just for once.

Think of these as impressionist photos of flowers.

The mixed pine, aspen, and spruce (I think) forest was beautiful (except for where someone had thrown empty beer cans into the woods). Everything was so quiet, except for the birdsong, the whirring sound of iridescent green hummingbirds going about their business, and the wind sighing through the pines. 

The smell of the piney air was delicious.

I must give a plug to the beautiful Sacramento Ranger District Visitor Center. It was like a lodge inside, with a stone fireplace and lots of natural wood everywhere. The rangers were friendly and eager to introduce us to their forest home. And I must say, the restrooms were pretty amazing, with advanced technology toilets that could flush two ways, depending on need--a water-saving feature for this drought stricken part of the country.

We met some people from New Hampshire out in the parking lot and, as people will do, established that we knew someone in common within the first 25 words of our conversation. It was a pretty good example of our small world. 

On the drive back home, there was a turnout for gazing at this view of the Tularosa Basin, with the White Sands National Monument sparkling out there in the middle. 

The Old Man Kicks

If I didn't give you any information to go with these photos, wouldn't you think that Beez was sliding in snow?

The old man kicks!

  

Faking it

Resting up for another climb

Even though we live just a couple of hours from a great ski mountain here in southern New Mexico, we'd have a hard time finding any snow this time of the year. Beez is sliding on the pure white gypsum sands at White Sands National Monument, just 45 minutes from our home in Las Cruces.

While we were there with our kids who were visiting from California and New York, we met and chatted with tourists from Switzerland and France. The Monument was recently named one of the best family-friendly parks by Open Road Guides. The dunes offer hiking, nature watching, sliding (of course), and lots of solitude. 

This little guy is called the Bleached Earless Lizard (click twice to enlarge the photo).
He is perfectly camouflaged against the white, white sands

Yucca Seed Pods

I don't know why we are having the weather that we've had the last few weeks, but we've felt very lucky. While the rest of the country is struggling with torrential rains and blizzards, we are having relatively mild temperatures and mostly clear blue skies here in the Chihuahuan Desert. 

At White Sands National Monument yesterday, families were sledding in the sand, which made it look a lot like very clean snow. At other times, when the sun came out from behind the light clouds, I could imagine that I could smell the ocean but, of course, it is far away from southern New Mexico. 

It's tricky to take photos out in the dunes, especially if you aren't there early or late in the day when the sun is low in the sky. When we visited in the mid-afternoon, the clouds were helping to keep some of the glare off the sand, but it was still difficult to see potential shots on the little screen on my camera. I just kept pointing and shooting and hoping for the best. 

Here are some shots of a yucca plant and its dried pods. 

I'll have to work on my Photoshop skills to fix the blown-out background of this photo sometime

The 8-Crayon Pack: Basic Colors for Skywatch

This is what it looks like sometimes at White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico: Sand-covered roadways blending into blindingly white gypsum dunes, blue mountains in the distance, and clear blue skies. It's like Nature at its plainest and most elemental--basic colors that could have come straight out of the 8-crayon Crayola box, no fancy blends.

Of course, if you hang around at sunrise or sunset, you see a whole different scene and the kind of colors found only in the 64-crayon Crayola box, the one we always wanted and seldom got when we were kids.

On the day I went to White Sands, the whites were so white and the sun was so strong that the tears ran down my cheeks and I could hardly open my eyes.

Those people in the distance were sledding on the dunes, by the way. They obviously had better sunglasses than mine!

Just for fun, I played a bit with the color. I wish I had some sunglasses that would do this.

For all kinds of skies in all kinds of colors, go to Skywatch.