Just a word in advance: we've seen and done so much in the past few days that I can't keep up with recapping all of it each evening. I'm just going to post what I can each day and then go back and fill in the gaps as I get the chance.
But today was another great day. I really like New Mexico. Our path:
The first stretch on Interstate 40 through Albuquerque was beautiful, but not great fun to drive. The landscape is extraordinary, as exotic as the moon, with high dry desert studded with color-striped cliffs and buttes as well as and full-scale mountains, like the Sandia Range at Albuquerque and the looming 11,000-foot Mt. Taylor, a dormant stratovolcano.
But it's hard for the driver to appreciate the views, because there are a Lot of Trucks on I40 and driving among them at 70 or 75 mph is challenging. Dad did most of it, as always, I did a little. We were both glad to swing south in Grants, NM onto New Mexico 53, an almost empty and unbelievably scenic road that took us from the volcanic lava lands around Grants at one end to the Zuni Reservation at the other. The high dry deserts around I40 gave way to a greener, softer-seeming landscape with grasslands, wildflowers and pines and junipers. But under the greenery is a rough volcanic landscape in disguise, with outcrops of black lava rocks everywhere and cinders instead of sand. Much of it is so rough that the Spanish couldn't cross it with their horses and named it El Malpais -- Spanish for Badlands. Right in the middle of it is one of the volcanoes that caused it all, Bandera (not my picture, obviously), which last erupted only 10,000 years ago.
We were startled to find ourselves crossing the Continental Divide and just as startled to realize how high the elevation was. The land had been rising so slowly for so long, all across New Mexico, that we didn't realize -- but the relatively cool temperatures, in the 80s when everyplace else has been well up in the 90s this week, should have been a clue.
The road wound through mixed grasslands and juniper and pine woods, studded with wildflowers I haven't had time to look up yet. I can't describe the fresh, bright scent on the the air. Whether it was the juniper or the pine or both, I don't know, but it was like evergreen wine.
Then we came to El Morro National Monument, an oasis in the high desert that has been refreshing travelers for hundreds of years. Here's how the National Park Service describes it: "Imagine the refreshment of finding water after days of dusty travel. A
reliable waterhole hidden at the base of a sandstone bluff made El Morro
(the headland) a popular campsite for hundreds of years. Here,
Ancestral Puebloans, Spanish and American travelers carved over 2,000
signatures, dates, messages, and petroglyphs."
From El Morro, we drove through the Zuni Reservation to Arizona and then through the Petrified Forest National Park. *
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