As I pulled into the picnic area parking lot, I was close to weeping from the pain and nausea that had worsened since getting off the plane two hours earlier in Albuquerque. “I have to just rest for a while,” I told Mr. Adventure. I put the seat back and closed my eyes.
It was not an auspicious start to a trip I’d been eagerly looking forward to. Each year for the past few years, Mr. Adventure has had a business conference in Santa Fe. Three years ago, when I started writing full-time, I was able to go along. While he’s working, I’m out exploring the area. When he’s done, we take a couple days and explore New Mexico together. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand what I mean when I say I have fallen hard for the state. The light, the landscape, the people, the culture, the history, the food… “Land of Enchantment” is the perfect state motto.
An invitation I wouldn’t dream of refusing
This year, we had even more to look forward to. We were on our way to Taos to visit friends we hadn’t yet met in person. Let me explain. Shortly after my book came out last fall, I received a message through my website from a historian whom I have admired for years. John Miles’s work on national parks and wilderness shaped my own thinking and helped me see the parks from a new perspective. John is retired from Western Washington University, where he taught for many years and helped create the school’s highly regarded Huxley College of the Environment. He also helped found the North Cascades Institute, an environmental education nonprofit where I spent three weeks as a creative resident in fall 2016. We had never met. I was more than a little in awe of him. So when John emailed me to say he’d read my book and thought it was excellent, and that he’d be reviewing it for National Parks Traveler, I was over the moon. For days, I went around the house saying, “John Miles! John Miles liked my book!” Then the review came out and it was better than I dreamed, calling the book “masterful” and “excellent.” I was walking on air.
John and I started an email correspondence. I knew through mutual friends that he had moved to the Taos area, and I asked whether I could buy him a beer or lunch as a thank you for the stellar review. He responded by insisting that Mr. Adventure and I come stay with him and his wife, longtime wilderness advocate Susan Morgan. Such generosity and warmth is typical of our New Mexico experiences, and we delightedly accepted.
Are we there yet?
Fast forward to departure day. Our plan was to fly to Albuquerque, pick up the rental car, and drive the two-plus hours to Taos to meet John and Susan. We woke at o’dark-thirty to make the plane, so I probably wasn’t in top form to begin with. In the air I snapped a photo of cloud-frosted Mount Rainier with our new camera and tried to relax. But as the flight progressed, so did my headache. By the time we landed, I was focused on not jarring my head, which felt as if an ice pick was embedded in the right side. “Do you have everything?” Mr. Adventure asked. “Let me carry stuff.” I just nodded and followed him into the terminal.
We got the car and I insisted on driving, figuring it might keep the pain, which by this point was making me nauseous, at bay. We were perhaps 10 miles from Taos when I pulled over and put the seat back. It helped. After 20 minutes, I felt a little better and we continued. Mr. Adventure called ahead and told John that I was ill, adding perhaps we should find a motel for the night. “Absolutely not!” I heard a voice boom through the phone. “We’ve got the casita ready for you!”
We arrived at their beautiful home in the hills above Taos and Susan sent me straight to bed, instructing me to take one of the ChlorOxygen capsules on the bathroom counter first. “I keep them there for friends who visit,” she said. “You started the day at sea level and you’re at 7,000 feet now. The altitude change can be really hard.” I swallowed a pill and lay down, while John and Mr. Adventure headed out for a hike in the hills.
Two hours later, I woke up feeling much better. The headache had lessened, the nausea was gone, and I was hungry. Susan was in the main house, and we talked until the guys returned, Mr. Adventure lugging a beautifully striated rock he’d found on their hike. A bowl of fresh guacamole and blue corn chips appeared, and I dug in. After a delicious dinner of homemade chicken burritos, I was feeling mostly normal, if a bit fragile. John had promised to take us hiking in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument the next day, and there was no way I was missing that opportunity.
Where’s the camera?
The next morning I felt markedly better. My head still hurt but it was fading, and I figured by the time we got to Santa Fe that evening I’d be fine. First, though, we were headed to Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. “Do you have the camera?” I asked Mr. Adventure. “No, I thought you did,” he replied. “Did you maybe leave it on the plane?” I thought I’d taken it, but after tearing apart the luggage and car looking for it, I realized he was probably correct. I’d taken it out of my backpack to snap that picture of Mount Rainier, and I couldn’t be sure I’d put it back. “Don’t worry,” Mr. Adventure reassured me. “The airline will have it.” I wasn’t as confident, and the fact that we’d owned the camera for less than a month made my oversight sting even more. In the meantime, though, the canyon awaited. iPhone cameras would have to suffice.
The national monument
As John drove us to the trailhead, he explained what we were seeing. President Obama designated the monument in 2013, protecting about 250,000 acres of land along the Rio Grande between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan Mountains. Rio Grande del Norte was part of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s so-called monuments review last year. The area was spared any boundary changes, but Zinke recommended changing the nature of some protections granted in the monument proclamation, purportedly to ensure livestock grazing can continue unabated. A survey of New Mexico news coverage suggests opposition to any such changes is fierce and vocal.
Last December, the Senate passed legislation sponsored by New Mexico senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich to designate 21,000 acres within the monument, including Ute Mountain and Rio San Antonio, as wilderness. Rep. Ben Ray Luján introduced a companion bill in the House last month. Despite wide local support touting the monument’s positive impact on the local economy, the House is unlikely to move the bill forward.
Volcanic cones dot the broad plain, evidence of the region’s geologically turbulent past. Over time, the Rio Grande carved an 800’ deep gorge into the layers of ash and basalt, offering food and shelter for animals and ancient peoples, as well as spectacularly scenic recreation for modern ones. It’s managed by the Bureau of Land Management and includes the Wild Rivers Recreation Area, where visitors can take in the confluence of the Red River and Rio Grande from wheelchair-accessible La Junta Point. We would be hiking in Wild Rivers a little north of there.
At the Big Arsenic Springs trailhead, a backpacker loading his truck told us he’d seen perhaps 30 bighorn sheep at the river. Oh boy! Bighorns are my favorite animal and I had yet to spot them in New Mexico. We started down the trail, switchbacking from the canyon rim toward the blue-green ribbon of river far below. My head still hurt, but I breathed deeply as I descended, savoring the scents of Ponderosa pine, juniper, and stone dust.
Where are the sheep?
We arrived at Big Arsenic Springs, a freshwater rivulet lined with watercress and animal tracks. Just beyond, John promised petroglyphs and hopefully sheep. He stopped regularly to glass the canyon walls for what writer Ellen Meloy described as “plump loaves of bread.” Invisible loaves, at least until they move. If they were there, we didn’t see them. But as we approached the petroglyphs, it was clear the bighorns had just cleared the area. Fresh clusters of their distinctive scat, the pellets resembling mini Hershey’s Kisses, were everywhere. They had to be here somewhere. But they weren’t, and I’ve found that with bighorns, the harder you look, the less likely you are to spot them.
Instead, John led us to a group of giant boulders covered with stone sheep—ancient carvings, evidence that bighorns have lived here for centuries and were important to the people who relied on the river canyon for sustenance. Deer, bird tracks, and people are also depicted, but sheep predominate. We explored the petroglyphs, occasionally scanning the river banks and opposite side for live sheep, then headed back downriver.
The trail climbed a bit and traversed a bench along the river to Little Arsenic Springs, about a mile away. I spotted a river otter swimming among some rocks. The animals were reintroduced in 2008 after being eliminated from New Mexico by the 1950s. Today, the appealing critters fish the river again. Past the springs, picnic shelters afford views of the canyon and a shady place to eat lunch. First, though, John wanted to show us something. We followed him up a short hill and down a primitive path to a large boulder. “This is the biggest petroglyph I’ve ever seen,” he said. The antlered deer or elk pecked into the rock is at least four feet tall, with much smaller deer surrounding it. Memorializing a hunt, perhaps? Or a big one that got away? The mystery of petroglyphs, the idea that we share so much with the people who created them, fascinates me. What were their lives like? What were they thinking when they decided to spend so much time carving images into stone?
Back to the casita
We ate our lunch in a picnic shelter and headed back up the trail. From Little Arsenic Springs, climbing to the canyon rim is a bit easier than the way we descended, and it made a nice loop. Once at the top, we followed the rim trail for another mile back to the car. The volcanic plain stretched into the distance, where we could see the giant scar of the Questa molybdenum mine on a mountainside. Its permanent closure in 2014 caused economic upheaval in the town of the same name, and it’s not yet clear whether agriculture and recreation tourism can make up the difference.
Back at John and Susan’s casita, we said hurried goodbyes. Mr. Adventure’s conference was starting in Santa Fe in a few hours, and he needed to be on time. I wasn’t ready to leave our new friends, and it must have showed. “You’ll come back next year,” Susan said firmly. It wasn’t a question. “And you’ll stay longer. We will expect you!” We tore ourselves away and drove south, along the Rio Grande, through Espanola, and into Santa Fe.
Mr. Adventure dashed into the hotel and slipped into the conference room, covered in canyon dust and wearing his desert hiking clothes. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “We were hiking in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and saw bighorns.” Everyone was duly impressed. No need to mention the sheep were stone.
We’ll have a quick chance to poke our heads into Rio Grande del Norte later in the week. I’ve been several times, but it’ll be Jen’s first visit.
If you go to La Junta Point, take a picture for me, will you? I can’t wait to go back there.
I visited New Mexico last year and fell in love. It really is a beautiful and magical place, with so much to explore.
I love it too! I can’t wait for my next trip.