Travelogues and Other Musings

Today was a slow day filled with many shorter walks, watching birds, bunnies, and people, and with sitting and talking. The first walk, we took with Kathy just around this neighborhood, where there are several trails around lakes, with some good birdwatching. At first, we didn’t see much, because this year’s drought has meant that the lakes are only partially filled, but then we did see some red-winged blackbirds, a cormorant, and most thrillingly, an osprey circling overhead that we identified with the help of Kathy’s bird book after we got home.

After that, Mark and I took off for Boulder (less than half an hour from here) and walked up and down Pearl Street (like we always do once in Boulder). We had some excellent Nepalese dumplings from a food truck for a very light lunch, so that we could also sample some (equally excellent) gelato. The Pearl St. stores do not hold much interest for us, so we didn’t go into any, but we did listen to a few musicians and watched kids playing in various play spaces along the route. Then we made our way to one of our favorite Boulder spots, the Eben G. Fine Park just before the canyon begins, where we walked along Boulder Creek and enjoyed the noise and the power of the water, drowning out most conversations and the joyful screams of kids playing with foam swords.

Around 1:30 pm, we went to see my aunt and uncle at their house–another must-do in Boulder whenever we go. They came here from Germany in the mid-60s, and have lived in the same beautiful mid-size Victorian home with a huge vegetable garden, which they still tend themselves (with their grandkid Benjamin’s help). Nothing ever changes in the house, and it still has the bakelite phone that I’m sure they had since they moved in (although I can only attest to its presence since 1990, when I first visited them). My aunt is in her 90s, my uncle in his late 80s, and we chatted about family, the garden, everyone’s health, and politics for a couple of hours. It was so very nice to see them.

We left about 4 pm and drove up to the top of Flagstaff Mountain, a short but winding road up from Boulder, to scramble around a little bit and again look for birds and other creatures. As we were driving up, I was looking down into a culvert on the roadside that was cordoned off with metal barriers, and spotted a black kit fox! I had a hard time convincing myself and Mark that I hadn’t just hallucinated, because of course we couldn’t capture it on a photo, but later, Kathy found a posting by a local who had spotted a red and a black fox kit and their mom in that spot earlier in the week. We also saw a hummingbird (they have only just arrived here in the mountain), and a nuthatch let us get pretty close.

We drove back home to Louisville at about 5:30 and basically had the same dinner as last night, but I was still twitchy, and so we went for one more nature walk, into the open fields and wetlands that lie in the other direction from our morning walk. We saw many bunnies and, more surprisingly, members of a small colony of prairie dogs, some red-winged blackbirds really hamming it up, and–again too quickly to capture photographically–a white bird lifting up from a ditch that Kathy helped us identify as a black-crowned night heron. We really had a good birding day for us amateurs!

It was pretty chilly and rather gray in the morning when we woke up in our old-fashioned (and slightly stuffy) motel room, and we took it slow packing up and catching up on some of our usual morning routines. But by 9 am, we were ready to check out and drove through the Garden of the Gods, getting out at the center of the park and walking around for a little bit. It didn’t amount to a hike–I am still not quite up for that with my tailbone, and it was also quite chilly (in the 40s after the 80s and 90s!), but it was still really stunning. Mark and I had both been to the Garden of the Gods before, but neither of us remembered the formations being so big! They are beautiful and the geology is amazing. Of course, we had to take photos at Balance Rock, but unlike the other tourists milling around, looking somewhat chilly but determined to get their turn, we didn’t take one where we held up or pushed the boulder. At about 11:15, we left the Garden and went to “Adams Mountain Café” nearby (in fact, only two minutes down the road from the motel where we had stayed), to meet with our friend Steve, who took time over his lunch to catch up with us. He’s a former colleague from Hastings, who now works here in Colorado Springs, and we restaged a spontaneous lunch we had with him and his wife Karrie when we came through here 5 years ago on our last road trip that also took us to Colorado Springs somewhat at the last minute. This time around, only Steve could join us, but it was great to catch up over vegetarian lunch/breakfast (I had an omelet and stole almost half of Mark’s orange-almond French toast). Around 1 pm, we said our goodbyes and set off for the Boulder area.

We had decided to forego the short route to Denver (and thereby avoid the always-horrible traffic in the entire Denver area) and take the scenic way through the easternmost roads North through the mountains (again with the help of Google Maps), and we ended up having a wonderful and varied drive. We started out in damp, gray, low-hanging clouds (i.e. light fog) driving up to about 8,000 feet, but just past Woodland Park, the clouds ripped open and we drove for about an hour through the most glorious sun-flooded mountain landscape, with huge boulders and rock faces, and creeks flowing through beautiful green meadows, the taller mountains or the plains to the east occasionally visible in the background at a scenic turn of the road. We got out a couple of times, and enjoyed the sun and the balmy 65 degrees.

And then, a few miles on, by the time we got to a little hamlet called Marshdale, it was foggy again, at 42 degrees, and a belated winter wonderland–there was a blanket of snow over the green grass, with the tender green leaves of the new aspens looking absurdly out of place. It was just a stunning contrast.

Once we were past Golden, CO, and within half an hour of our destination at a much lower altitude, the weather settled into an evenly overcast and a little chilly late-spring day, and we drove back into the plains by Boulder, to what is basically the “suburbia town” of Louisville. For people who are not familiar with Boulder (which we have visited regularly for decades), it has a broad green belt where nothing can be built, but inside that green belt, space for private residences has become so sparse and so expensive, that former “nothing towns” in the area, like Louisville, Lafayette, or Marshall, became enormous new developments with their own elaborate infrastructure. This is where Mark’s cousin and his wife live, and where we are going to stay for the next few days. We stopped at a big grocery store a few minutes from them and picked up some dinner ingredients, so that when we showed up on their doorstep around 5 pm, we didn’t come empty-handed. I made a big charcuterie board (I had found some really good cheese) and a salad, and we had that and then some angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream for dinner. It was delightful, but even more delightful was the great conversation with Stan and Kathy, whom we hadn’t seen in a long time–last time we were here, they were on vacation, and we were basically housesitting rather than hanging out with them. But tonight, we got to talk about old family photos and stories, and had a really good and relaxing time–and I even got our accumulated laundry done!

Memorial Day–but if it hadn’t been for a stream of reminders from Facebook, we would have never noticed! The places we went today did not really show any signs of there being a holiday–there were not many reminders beyond the flags that one would expect at national monuments and parks, nor was there a whole lot of traffic. Our day had three parts:

First, early in the morning, we drove to White Sands National Monument, which is about 45 minutes from our digs, through the Organ Mountains and into the Tularosa Basin. The White Sands area is famous for two things, but we did not get a glimpse of one of them: First, it has notorious missile testing sites–and sometimes the National Park portion closes because of current missile testing. Of course, these are no longer atomic bombs, but in the 50s, they were tested here at the Trinity site (Mark: “Shoot, I didn’t bring my Geiger counter”). Second, it is a spectacular and unusual hiking area, because these dunes, which otherwise do look like very fine sand dunes, with lots of drifts and sparse vegetation, are really and truly blindingly white. The dust blowing across the blue sky is also white (instead of the yellowish tint we have seen in the air a lot because of wildfires and little dust devils everywhere). The White Sands are a gigantic gypsum deposit–the world’s largest, and big enough to be visible from space. The geology is fascinating, and the dunes, both with and without vegetation in the snowy white, are gorgeous. We got to the site at about 8 am, and really had a wonderful time there. We took an abbreviated version of a 5-mile hike (which would have taken 3 hours, because going up a sand dune is serious work); our shortcut (from one visible trail marker to another, so not risky) cut it down to under 3 miles and only two hours. It was still early and not hot (upper 70s, lower 80s) and there was a bit of a breeze, so the sand was still cool, and some of it has recrystallized just a little bit, part of it feels like walking on drywall (which is made of gypsum, normally) rather than on sand. But some of the dunes were soft enough going down that we sank in to our calves and then left basically no trace as we went downhill along with the fine, glittery sand. A lot of people bring their kids and circular sleds, because it is really even better than sledding on snow–certainly in terms of temperatures!

For this hike, we were smarter–we took a ton of water and also a couple of granola bars, and there were bandaids in the car, too. Walking sticks would not have done anything. We also walked two leisurely smaller trails, one on sand and one on a boardwalk (less than .5 miles in and out), with some interesting information about the dunes and the plants and animals that live in this arid environment. The gypsum actually preserves moistures just a few inches below the surface, so plants with elaborate root systems, including some cottonwood trees, but mostly smaller bushes and yucca plants (in full bloom here as well, but also already visible as empty seed pods), and there is a kind of mouse here, the Apache Pocket mouse, that actually doesn’t drink, but takes seeds in its cheek pouches to little damp storage spaces, where they soak up the moisture, and that’s how the mouse gets its liquid. We did see some of the mouse tracks, and we also spotted a couple of lizards. There is nothing quite as adorable as seeing a white lizard that’s no longer than 3 inches/6 cm with the tail included (the Bleached Earless Lizard, which apparently is neither bleached nor earless, but sure looks like it) “threaten” us by pumping up and down on its little legs. But it is hard to photograph. Mark was luckier with a bigger lizard later on.

Part Two of the day came after a picnic at the White Sands visitor center on the way out–sandwiches with ham and cheese and the potato/green bean/asparagus salad from last night that Randy and Laurie had sent with us–delicious! It involved another 45-minute drive and a much shorter hike with amazing art we did not expect to be so plentiful: We went to the Three Rivers Petroglyph site, run by the Bureau of Land Management and almost completely deserted. It features a 1-mile walk up some rocky terrain–but in that terrain, there are over 21,000 petroglyphs carved into dark volcanic rock! From the winding paths, you can see dozens and dozens of them, and Mark got some amazing photos of some of the most interesting shapes–animals, faces, dotted circles, bird tracks. Amazing once we figured out what to look for–and our walk was not even that hot, since we had a cooling breeze and it was “only” 86 rather than in the 90s yesterday. Very little is known about the meaning of these, or the particular group of people who lived here, the Jornada Mogollon, sometime between 200 AD and 1450 AD (there is a nearby village that has been partly excavated, but we had no energy left to explore it).

We were so glad we went–even though I fell on my butt when I stepped back and ended up on a wobbly rock, so that my tailbone is a bit sore and I had to sit on an ice pack during dinner at Laurie and Randy’s. That was the third and last part of the day was to drive the 1.5 hours back to Las Cruces (again, very little traffic), stop for some groceries at a local Albertsons, and have dinner with Randy and Laurie again. I made a salad, and Randy made a pizza with delicious toppings and lots of mozzarella and asiago, and we talked about food memories and interesting people and places, and had a wonderful time. We brought a little tiny cheesecake, just enough for the four of us, so there was even dessert. But we left about 8 pm, just after the sun set, and went back to the Calle del Arroyo to do some basic packing and take showers, so that we can get a quick start tomorrow. I was very tired by the end of the day, even more so than Mark, I think!

We took off very early this morning from Marfa, when it was still blissfully cool (just as the 95 yesterday had not felt quite that hot, with the breeze, the 61 this morning felt warmer than that, too, and very pleasant), and drove a bit more than 3 hours to Las Cruces. We stopped a couple of times to take pictures of the mountains that surrounded the plain that we were driving through, and which look so interesting and alien–like huge rounded sand piles that seem like they could just drift off or flatten themselves like beach sand, until the Interstate goes through a cutout and it is clear that they are made of pink and gray-blue granite, while the sandstone that is all around is what has already eroded. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to the drive–I napped for quite a while; the only major city on the way from Marfa to Las Cruces is El Paso / Ciudad Juarez, where we could see the border in the distance from the I-10 at several points. It must have been so different here when people were just going back and forth with ease. Shortly after that, we crossed into New Mexico, and arrived at about 10:30 mountain time in Las Cruces.

Our friend Randy, who lives in Las Cruces, had given us some great tips about trying to do a few things today that we would otherwise have missed: the market in the downtown area (which used to be pedestrian, but had car access reintroduced in the early 2000s), and, in the same area, the three main city museums (the Museum of Art, the Museum of Science, and the Branigan Cultural Center), which are not open Sundays or Mondays. So we started with the long stretch of farmers’ market, which was 80% tchotchkes and snacks and 20% produce and meats (including large bundles of dried hot peppers–people hang them on the walls everywhere, we discovered). It was already swelteringly hot, so after we had wandered up and down and had a mediocre breakfast burrito from a food truck in a shaded area on the main plaza, we checked out the three museums, which are very small, but AIR-CONDITIONED. The science museum had an interesting permanent exhibit about the nearby fossil tracks (with replicas of the tracks), the art museums has changing traveling exhibits and was showing American impressionists–the kind that are minor enough that even I, with my decent grasp of American art, had not encountered most of the names. But there was an interesting semi-impressionist John Sloan piece included, as well as a Robert Henri portrait of a little girl, and I did like a true “impression” of the ocean in Monterey Bay that I had not encountered before. The Branigan Center, formerly the public library, had a couple of small exhibits on New Mexico aviation and on the Japanese internment camps in this area, and a little bit of contemporary local art (quilts and paintings by a Native two-spirit painter). But it did not take us long to go through all three, and after a little bit more milling around and having a Mexican-style lemonade (hibiscus for me and pineapple-coconut for Mark), we decided to find the historic area near our Airbnb and explore that.

So we drove about ten minutes to historic Mesilla, the town that was across the Rio Grande from Las Cruces in the 19th century, and almost exclusively built and inhabited by descendants of Mexicans that had lived here before the area became part of the US, in the classic adobe style. But later the area became fully absorbed into Las Cruces (as the Rio Grande also shifted its course, presumably by human intervention, so it was no longer physically separate), even as it retained a distinctive Mexican style. Today, the little market square with the village church (San Albino) is a tourist attraction, and the surrounding mini city blocks are full of boutiques and bars and restaurants, intermixed with small, one-story residences and a few run-down deserted adobe structures that are falling apart and haven’t been gentrified yet. The forerunner to the Wells Fargo Pony Express, the Butterfield, had a stage stop here at Mesilla, and the stagecoach inn is now one of the more popular restaurants, La Posta. We wandered around the main square, since it was still way too early to go to our lodgings (2:30 pm was our check-in time, and it was only about 1 pm), but it was unpleasantly hot and windy. (“Bread oven,” my friend Randy says.) So we eventually fled into a gelato-and-wine store that I had spotted (wine-tasting is apparently a must here wherever you go), and got tips from the woman who ran it about places to see while tasting the gelato and sorbet, which is made by the culinary arts division of the New Mexico State University, which has its main campus here). Yum.

Finally, it was time to check in and we settled into our lovely little “casita”–which is really just one room with a bathroom built onto a garage, but a) very nicely set up, so that there is a little kitchen “kiosk” with plates and glasses and a microwave + fridge that includes a freezer, and b) very very new and clean. We were very happy with it and spent the next hour or so just resting and recovering from the heat; we both took a little nap. Around 4 pm, our friends Randy and Laurie came by and brought us an adorable and wonderfully practical welcome package: some fresh bread that Randy had baked, some local cheese, honey, and pecans, and some lemon marmelade and apple butter that Laurie had canned. We were set for a charcuterie dinner, and very happy! We chatted for an hour (even as there was just barely enough room for all of us) and got lots of additional tips for where to go and what to do in our two days here (and at what time of day).

When they left, we had our fantastic “Abendbrot” with everything they brought us, including these fabulous little cinnamon cookies called biscoches (or biscochitos) that are a local specialty, as a dessert. We then went for another walk around the neighborhood, now that it was cooler and we could truly enjoy it. From some spots a little further down the avenida de Mesilla, we could see the mountains really well, as well as some of the fantastic cacti and enormous yucca plants in some of the front yards; when we returned to the town plaza, the live music from a bar provided background sound as we just sat and enjoyed the evening air. It was pretty quiet (partly because this is the weekend of the wine festival, which draws everyone to the fairgrounds) but we enjoyed it, as well as our return to the cozy casita where we’ll be for a few days.