What a whirlwind of a day. So many highs and lows–It started out with me traveling to Sandia Crest, the highest peak of the Sandia mountain range. The drive from our hotel takes about 47 minutes and the road up the mountain is a twisty-turny carnival ride. At one point a pair of turkeys crossed in front of me. They weren’t anything like the brown turkeys that we have in Ohio. These were more white than brown, which makes sense given that there was still a lot of snow on the ground once you got pretty far up.
The peak is about 10,000 feet up and your ears pop a lot on the way up and down. At the bottom of the mountain the temp was about 40º F, by the time I got to the peak it was 32º with a very stiff wind blowing across the peaks. There was so much snow still there that the door to the ranger station was obstructed by about 4-5 feet of snow.
The views from that spot are amazing.
From there, I went to the Petroglyph National Monument park. This area is very much part of the desert. There are a couple of different trails, one of them is pretty strenuous, the other one (the one I chose) is less strenuous, but still not a simple hike of about 2.2 Miles. From Ice to Fire. It was pretty hot in the valley where the petroglyphs are. These are carvings that native Americans and some of the Spanish settlers made into the basalt rocks scattered around the area. According to the literature, the carvings were made somewhere between 1100 AD through the 1700s. Many of the carvings are of animals — birds, small local animals in the area, or pictures of hands, and mythical people.
This was a quick shot using my iPhone. When I get my film developed and scanned I can add them to this posting.
My last stop for the day was at the Salinas Pueblo Missions national park. This site is located outside Mountainair, NM, about an hour drive south of Albuquerque. I wish I had time to go back to see it in the daytime. I really wanted to get some great astro photography shots, but the moon was too bright and it really threw off my ability to get the sky really dark with lots of stars. I got one shot that I really like.
Michael King Photography 