April 2023

Books read:

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary Carter
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Trails walked:

South Rim and Fountain Valley trails in Roxborough State Park (April 6th)
Homestead Meadows via Lion Gulch near Pinewood Springs (April 13th)
Eagle/Hidden Valley/Cobalt loop near Boulder (April 17th)
Guadalupe Mountain and Chiflo trails near Taos, NM (April 24th)
Cebolla Mesa to Big Arsenic Spring near Taos, NM (April 26th)

“Song” of the month – Xiye Bastida - If You Adults Won't Save the World, We Will.

Scientist Spotlight – Six climate scientists making a difference:

Michael Oppenheimer
Corinne Le Quéré
Ken Caldeira
Carlos Duarte
Julie Arblaster
Kaveh Madani

April Summary:

Another Earth Day/Month in the books. In a recent interview, climate activist and journalist Bill McKibben said, “I accepted a long time ago that a large part of my job was just going to be a professional bummer-outer of other people, because I’ve had to bring this message for a long, long, long time that things were going very badly.” That’s how I sometimes feel when I bring up climate change either in writing or in conversation. I catch myself sometimes and will occasionally change the topic just to give everyone a breath of fresh air (if they can find one…I can’t help myself). I’m sure that as soon as some folks read that first sentence, they clicked out to see the latest cat video on TikTok. For those of you still reading and who want to dig in a bit more into the details of this humongous problem, this article last month in Carbon Brief is outstanding. It “summarizes” the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report, which is a bit terrifying, yet still hopeful. I put “summarizes” in quotes because it’s a very long article. But the descriptions and graphics are top notch. If you take the time to read the article, you will come away with an excellent understanding of the situation. If you only have time for one long read today, please read the Carbon Brief article instead of my blog😉.

But then you wouldn’t get to read about my latest terrifying health scare. On April 19th as I finished up my old-man ritual of getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I lost all vision and orientation for a few seconds, maybe 3-5 seconds (thankfully after I finished going to the bathroom). Then I had an imprint of a sort of corona in my right eye for a few minutes. It was not at all painful but was disorienting and strange. So I called my primary care provider first thing in the morning and they recommended seeing an ophthalmologist asap. Luckily, I was able to get in, and after a round of many tests on very expensive equipment, no eye damage or indication of any problem was found. They said my next stop needed to be the emergency room for more tests because they suspected a TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack), which is a fancy name for a mini stroke. TIAs are many times a harbinger of a larger stroke to come. After four hours in the ER and many more tests on fancy and expensive equipment….nothing was found. So, did I just dream this all happened? No way, it was too real. So, my next stop will be to see a neurologist for more extensive (and expensive) tests on even fancier equipment. But the story will have to end here for now because the earliest I could get in was May 4th. I guess they’re not too concerned. This event was especially terrifying for me because my Arizona Hiking Buddy (HB), tragically passed away in November of 2020 at the age I currently am, from a blood clot. Plus a very good college buddy who is an avid mountain biker, also my age, just underwent open heart surgery to repair a valve (thankfully with success). Life is precious. More next month.

Jerry Springer died recently. I thought it was appropriate timing since it happened around the same time that Tucker Carlson (Fox News) and Don Lemon (CNN) were fired. Springer's daytime show portraying the worst of American civilization began in the mid-nineties, around the same time that our political divisions started to air on television and the same time that Newt Gingrich advised new congressional members to stop socializing with members of the other party. There are other periods of time one can point to for the start of America's societal downfall (Vietnam, Watergate, the stained blue dress, Guantanamo, etc.), but for me, the mid-90s is where we, as a society started to fail the better natures of ourselves. Salman Rushdie's latest novel, which I read this month, provides a superb portrayal of the ups and downs of a society and how, even with the best intentions of a creator, the selfish gene of greed and hatred, even by just a few, can cause the downfall of a society.

This month’s reading was a bit pared down mainly due to reading a 600-page economics book (why do I do this to myself?). I also read a Pulitzer Prize winning novel from 13 years ago, and the latest from one of my favorite authors….My hiking took me to a pretty state park near Denver, a meadow in search of old homesteads, a dog-walk near Boulder, and some Taos ramblings with my daughter….

Enjoy.

Scientist Spotlight:

The Pioneer: Michael Oppenheimer - Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton
The Rarity: Corinne Le Quéré - Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia
The Advisor: Ken Caldeira – Atmospheric scientist
The Paradox: Carlos Duarte – Marine ecologist and Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
The Cassandra: Julie Arblaster - Professor in the School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment at Monash University in Australia
The Target: Kaveh Madani – Officially, he is Director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Unofficially he is Iran's expat eco-warrior

I ran across this great Reuters article from 2020 that began with: ” At the start of every disaster movie is a scientist being ignored …” The article went on to give a brief description of how climate scientists have been ignored through the years, even with mounds of data proving their point, and with that data proving to be true time and time again. Then they describe each of these six scientists who have made a difference on the topic of climate change. They end with a list of their ranking of the top 1,000 climate scientists in the world, based on an examination of 350,000 papers. Check it out here.

“Song” of the month: Xiye Bastida - If You Adults Won't Save the World, We Will.

In lieu of a song for this Earth Month, I opted to share with you a Ted Talk from 2020 by then-18-year-old Xiye Bastida. It’s a letter to her abuela back in Mexico. Xiye has been a climate activist for most of her young life, first living in Mexico, and then New York City. She’s an inspiration. I recently read an interview of her and Bill McKibben that was enlightening and refreshing. My favorite line from the interview was when McKibben said, “My path to activism was basically starting to understand my mistakes of perception about the world." I loved that because that’s how I came into my work on helping to solve the climate problem. It took lots of reading and contemplation to shake me out of my "doldrums" (or as Coach Beard called them in Ted Lasso – pineapple percussions).

Here is Xiye’s Ted Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWkIgCnUWvY

And here’s a link to the interview with Xiye and Bill McKibben.

South Rim and Fountain Valley trails in Roxborough State Park – I discovered this state park in a book my wife had given me called 100 Classic Hikes in Colorado by Scott S. Warren. Now that I have my affordable $29 yearly state park pass (thanks to the new Colorado car license fee), I plan to visit more state parks this year. The park is just southwest of Denver in the foothills and contains a unique mix of fascinating red rock formations, prairie grasslands, and foothills. There are 14 miles of trails in the park (I only walked 6 of them on this day). The visitors center is really nice and has lots of hands-on displays for kids along with a listing of recent animal sightings, including a mother bear and her cub, the first bear sighting of the year as they are coming out of hibernation. There were also bobcats and eagles on the list. I saw lots of deer and a couple of eagles soaring high overhead, but no bears or bobcats on this day. Lots of small birds like chickadees and nuthatches were flitting about through the trees also. One of the challenges in the foothills this time of year is mud, and my boots were caked with it for much of the South Rim trail; it felt as though I were wearing lead weights on my shoes as I trudged up the 400 feet of elevation in the first mile. But I was rewarded with great views of the plains to the east and the long line of red rock ridges to the north. Those red rock ridges were my eventual destination as the Fountain Valley trail follows the base of them. I didn’t start my hike at the visitors’ center, but if I had I would have noticed a very helpful sign that indicated the muddiness of each of the trails…next time. Luckily the Fountain Valley trail was completely dry so I was able to shed all the mud my shoes had collected on the South Rim trail. The Fountain Valley trail was very similar to Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs and some Sedona, Arizona hikes. Beautiful red rock formations. To give you an idea of how scenic the place is, they host wedding events at a couple of overlooks in the park. There’s also a restored stone house along the trail that was built in 1903 by New Yorker Henry Persee who had dreams of establishing a resort in this area. Those dreams ended when he was tragically killed by a Denver streetcar in 1918. The stone house is normally open to visitors; however it was closed on this day (probably because they didn’t want mud tromped all over the place). I hope to return to this park again to hike the Carpenter’s Peak and Bear Canyon trails.

Heading up to the top of that ridge; deer in the background

Some snow

..and lots of mud

Great views of red rock formations

Red rocks stretching north

Red pillar

Lizard rock?

Red Mitten?

Red Wall

Old stone house built in 1903

Looking down from the high point on the Fountain Valley trail

Helpful sign indicating trail conditions

The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter - I had heard many good reviews of this 600-page economics book so decided to give it a whirl, even though I would say that economics is not normally a favorite, or even interesting, topic for me. Carter graduated from the University of Virginia with degrees in politics and philosophy and began his career writing about the banking industry just as the 2008 financial crisis hit. Winner of the Hillman Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, his debut book was also on the best book of the year lists from The New York Times, The Economist, and Business Insider. Carter is currently a financial writer and has had articles published in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect and other outlets.

Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times writes about this book, “Carter traces the splintering of John Maynard Keynes’s intellectual legacy and the neoliberal backlash of Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek. Both Keynesians and neoliberals claimed that their theories were bulwarks against authoritarianism, but neither side could claim the moral high ground by the mid-1970s. Neoliberals like Milton Friedman were advising the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile, while successive American administrations resorted to Keynesian fiscal maneuvers to fund the prolonged bloodshed of the Vietnam War.”

I certainly don’t pretend to understand all of the economic theories and history presented in this book, but I feel like Carter gave me a good idea of how difficult this topic is and anyone who claims to know what will happen, economically, really has no idea what they’re talking about because nobody can predict things like world wars, or pandemics, or that collateralized debt obligations would cause the near collapse of global markets. Nassim Taleb wrote about the impossibility of prediction in his fascinating book, The Black Swan which I reviewed in June of 2021.

Carter's book begins with a sort of biography of John Maynard Keynes, his powerful intellect, and his involvement with the “Bloomsbury” art scene which included authors such as Virginia Woolf and EM Forster. Keynes ended up helping Great Britain survive the financial traumas of two world wars and a great depression while he served as a key member of the treasury. His ideas were adopted by Franklin Roosevelt for his New Deal policies and by Lyndon Johnson for his Great Society programs. Keynes is generally recognized, along with Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, as one of the world’s great economic thinkers. The book provides a nice summary of 20th century history and it equally credits and discredits US presidents and other world leaders for their forays into economic policy decisions.

I think that the following lines from the book will give you a better idea about it than my rambling:

Keynes was a tangle of paradoxes: a bureaucrat who married a dancer; a gay man whose greatest love was a woman; a loyal servant of the British Empire who railed against imperialism; a pacifist who helped finance two world wars; an internationalist who assembled the intellectual architecture for the modern nation-state; an economist who challenged the foundations of economics.

It was easy for Wilson to talk about sweeping global change when the war had transformed the United States from an industrializing young nation into a global superpower in the span of a few short years.

“The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty,” Keynes wrote.

With fully half of the elderly population living in poverty, FDR had approved the new Social Security program to provide what he called “social insurance” payments for those who could not work due to old age or disability. Social Security would revolutionize life for the elderly, eventually combining with Medicare and a few smaller programs to drive the elderly poverty rate down

Helping the rich get richer, Kennedy had argued, was the surest way to help the country. “I am not sure,” Galbraith had previously told Kennedy, “what the advantage is in having a few more dollars to spend if the air is too dirty to breathe, the water too polluted to drink, the commuters are losing out on the struggle to get in and out of the cities, the streets are filthy, and the schools so bad that the young, perhaps wisely, stay away.”

The black poverty rate would not drop below 30 percent until 1995. It is 21.8 percent today, compared to 8.8 percent among white households.

Like Rosalind Franklin, who had codiscovered the molecular structure of DNA with James Watson and Francis Crick, (Joan) Robinson was a brilliant woman persistently sidelined by a profession (economics in Robinson's case) hostile to women.

Vietnam and Watergate, meanwhile, had done tremendous damage to popular faith in American government. For the first time in decades, an aggressively antigovernment message could plausibly carry progressive promise. The government was dishonest. Democrats and Republicans alike had sent people to die for lies.

Less than a decade after Clinton left office, the masters of the universe his economic program had empowered would blow up their own banks and the global economy, launching the United States and the world into the worst recession since the Great Depression. We are still paying the price today.

the United States improved its carbon footprint during the twenty-first century largely by offshoring its dirty work to China. Life expectancy for Chinese families living in the smog-choked northern cities has declined by 3.1 years as a result of chronic long-term exposure to air pollution.

By the end of 2007, U.S. banks had over $14.4 trillion in credit default swaps outstanding, roughly equal to the entirety of U.S. economic output for one year,

Between 2006 and 2014, 9.3 million families lost their homes

The bailouts of 2008 and 2009 saved the global financial system. But they did not save the American middle class.

today, 80 percent of all financial stock is owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of all households.

Ever since the New Deal, the most important financial asset for the American middle class has been a home, and houses were the one financial asset the government had elected not to rescue.

the American experience does not inspire confidence. The greatest American victories for democracy and equality—the end of slavery in the nineteenth century and the defeat of fascism in the twentieth—came at the end of a gun.

Homestead Meadows near Pinewood Springs – This is the third time I’ve hiked up to Homestead Meadows and it won’t be the last. I also visited in February of 2021 and in November of 2022. The meadows are beautiful, and you immediately see why settlers in the late 1800s and early 1900s sought this area out. I hiked today with my daughter and her wonder dog who were visiting from Taos. We had a goal to explore at least two of the homesites we’d yet to see on previous visits, however our attempts at finding them failed when we took a couple of wrong turns. But luckily the new meadows we visited were also beautiful and we got some peeks at the snow-capped Rockies. We put in about 9 miles today. Six of those miles are spent on the 3-mile access trail to the meadows. This is the Lion Gulch trail which climbs around 1500 feet in those 3 miles, so you get a bit of an uphill workout before wandering around the meadows in search of old homesites. The Lion Gulch trail still has quite a bit of snow and ice on the northern faces, but spikes likely wouldn’t help much as they were pretty slushy. There are at least eight homesteads up here. I’ve already explored the Brown, Griffith, Irvin, and Walker sites on two previous trips. Our goal today was the Engert and Laycook sites, but we somehow missed them. The other two are Boren and Hill. Next time!

Wonder dog

Daughter crossing muddy waters

Well, we didn't find any of them...next time

Nice views of snow capped peaks from one of the meadows

Wonder dog finding water

....and snow

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – I thoroughly enjoyed this winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. The Pulitzer Prize Board noted that the novel was an "inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.” The book was assembled as a series of thirteen short stories with interrelated characters spanning time from the 1970s through current days; and you must work for your reading entertainment in order to understand it (which I love to do). Egan said that the book was inspired by Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and by the TV series The Sopranos; now THAT’S a wide swath! The “Goon” in the title is a metaphor for time and how it saps you of your youth and ideals. There are a couple of really inventive chapters, including one that is written as a sort of Rolling Stone magazine review and one that was a 76-page PowerPoint about famous “pauses” in rock songs…and it was brilliant!

The book loosely follows the lives of music producer Bennie Salazar and his assistant, Sasha, along with their many friends from high school, college, and working life. It’s a roller coaster ride from punk rock concerts to African safaris to murderous third world generals. It’s the first book of Egan’s I’ve read, and I loved her style. Her latest novel, Candy House is already on my waiting list at the library. Here are some lines:

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco.

Dean, a blond actor whose genius for stating the obvious—“It’s hot,” or “The sun is setting,” or “There aren’t many trees”—is a staple source of amusement for Mindy.

When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.

I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

“I go away for a few years and the whole f@$%ing world is upside down,” Jules said angrily. “Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone’s office. Everybody sounds stoned, because they’re e-mailing people the whole time they’re talking to you.

She jolted awake as if someone had shaken her. The dream nearly escaped, but Dolly caught it,

no one will fight with you now—the fact that you hacked open your wrists with a box cutter three months ago and nearly bled to death seems to be a deterrent.

for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of “you” at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel it—what you’ve seen in people’s faces on the street—a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something you can’t quite see.

She was “clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

“if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?” “Because if your reasons are cash, that’s not belief. It’s bulls@$%t.”

There was a lunar quiet to the streets of the Lower East Side.

Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there—his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet.

Eagle/Hidden Valley/Cobalt loop near Boulder - In my never-ending quest to hike all the trails in the foothills of Boulder, I discovered this nice little open leash dog friendly trail just west of Boulder Reservoir. We are dog-sitting this week so I wanted to find a trail that wonder dog would also enjoy, and this was it. Lots of prairie dogs to chase (although you’re not technically allowed to have your dog chase them, I figured it was a safe exercise for the prairie dogs to practice their evasion skills for when a real predator like a coyote or bobcat was after them. After all, wonder dog just wants to play with them). There is also a small lake along the way where other dogs were swimming in to keep cool (Boulder Valley Ranch Pond). I parked at the Eagle trailhead on 55th street and wandered around 6 miles on the Eagle, Hidden Valley, and Cobalt trails. There were nice views of the Flatirons and some rolling hills with a few cattle scattered about. This wouldn’t be a great trail in the summer as there is zero shade out here, and probably lots of snakes. Another access trailhead is at Boulder Valley Ranch off Longhorn Road, east of Foothills Parkway. I saw very few people today; a couple of dog walkers and maybe three mountain bikers.

Wide open spaces

Nice views of the Flatirons

Boulder Reservoir to the east

Flatirons views

An artist trying to better capture what my camera can't

I'm sure his painting was better

Winding trail

Lonely tree

Victory City by Salman Rushdie - This latest novel from Rushdie is another masterpiece, and it's not just me saying that. It's too early for announcement of the Pulitzer Prize but I wouldn't be surprised to see this book as a finalist. From the novel's very first line you know you are in for a special read: "On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker, and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax in the heart of the ruined Royal Enclosure, as a message to the future." He's a master of opening lines. The story is a sort of retelling of the ancient city of Vijayanagar (Victory City) which lasted from the 1300s to the 1500s on the southern tip of current day India. Vijayanagar’s ruins are now called Hampi, and its temples are a UNESCO world heritage site. Rushdie's retelling is done by the story's heroine, Pampa Kampana (great name). In the novel, the capital city is named Bisnaga and it goes through many of the same ups and downs as other cities of its time, eventually being destroyed due to man's lust for power and by religious intolerance.

Rushdie was just finalizing the book when he was attacked last August, stabbed a dozen times and left for dead. He lost sight in one eye and still has several other permanent injuries. I wrote more about this in my August 2022 and February 2023 blogs.

The New York Times' review starts as follows: "Pampa Kampana’s tale begins when her mother walks into the flames. “The story goes” that with all their husbands dead in battle, the women of a small and ruined kingdom built a bonfire on the banks of a river, “said farewell to one another” and silently stepped into death. The “cannibal pungency” of their burning also smelled of sandalwood and cloves, and afterward Pampa could never bring herself to eat meat, not once in all her remaining 238 years, during which she was three times a queen and aged so slowly that she looked younger than her own great-granddaughters many times removed."

It's terrific and like many of Rushdie's novels addresses the issues of religious intolerance, male/female equality, and man's endless and hopeless lust for power. But there also periods of hope, golden ages, interspersed throughout the city's history. These periods of hope contain ingredients for the type of civilization we should strive for. Here are some of the many great lines from the book:

The Portuguese visitor arrived on Easter Sunday. His name was Sunday as well—Domingo Nunes—and he was as handsome as the daylight, his eyes the green of the grass at dawn, his hair the red of the sun as it set, and he had a speech impediment that only made him more charming to the people of the new city, because it allowed him to avoid the arrogance of white men when confronted with darker skins.

She found the two princes trying to forget their boredom by playing chess, a game neither of them had fully mastered, so that they overestimated the importance of knights and castles and, being men, severely underestimated the queen.

“What’s a gun?” Pampa Kampana asked. “It’s a weapon that will change the world,” Domingo Nunes said. “And I can build it for you if you want.”

Let’s go to war and bring peace to the land

"the end is near,” she said. “You will die the day after tomorrow, because your heart will explode, and perhaps it will be my fault. I’m sorry.”

these gigantic prayer meetings were really political rallies in disguise, which was a misuse of religion in the service of power.

Whatever kind of mother she might be, she would still have to watch her children die.

Pampa learned the lesson every creator must learn, even God himself. Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices.

into the trees they went, and the rules of the outside world fell away.

I sometimes wish I was back there, young like you, and strong and full of determination and hope, knowing nothing about the harshness and cruelty of the world that beats optimism out of the young and makes them old.

“There will be no more burning of living women on dead men’s pyres in Bisnaga,” Pampa Kampana said with great ferocity. “Never again.”

she was already mourning the victory of the humdrum, the mundane, over that other reality. The victory of the line of ordinary boys over that of extraordinary girls.

on his deathbed Tuluva, the father of both Narasimha and Krishna, told the two sons that whoever could pull the signet ring off his finger would be king. Narasimha tried, but the finger was too swollen, because the old man was too full of death; then Krishna simply cut off his father’s finger and grabbed the ring for himself.

This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.

“If one is to tell an important lie,” she said, “it’s best to hide it among a crowd of unarguable truths.”

a thirsty army is no good in a fight, unless it’s a fight over access to water.

Achyuta was religious, in the sense of being hostile to followers of other religions...We are good, they are bad, that’s the sum total of his religion.

My actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Guadalupe Mountain and Chiflo trails near Taos, NM - I was able to get in some hiking with my daughter on a trip this month to Taos. We ended up hiking two different trails on this day

which took us from a mountaintop where we got snowed on, to a hike where the sun shined down hard and we were sweating (well I was) climbing out of the Rio Grande Gorge.

Situated between the village of Questa and the Rio Grande Gorge, Guadalupe Mountain rises a thousand feet above the gorge's rim in 2 miles of walking. The weather was in the upper 40s and partly cloudy at the start, and by the time we reached the peak we were getting snowed on! The views from up here are beautiful. To the east are the snow capped mountains of the Latir Wilderness and Carson National Forest. To the north is a spectacular view of the Rio Grande gorge slicing it's way toward Colorado. After enjoying the views and bundling up for the snow, we headed back down and drove a couple of miles north and west to the rim of the gorge to hike the Chiflo trail. Chiflo is a Spanish word meaning whistle, and evidently refers to the sound of the wind through the canyon here. The trail steeply drops down 350 feet in less than half a mile to the river. There are great views of the gorge on the way down. We hung out at the river's edge for a while watching a group of bighorn sheep across the river. Then we headed back up the steep trail to end our hiking day. We drove south to the Wild Rivers Recreation Area to get a great view of the confluence of the Red and Rio Grande Rivers from La Junta point. There is a trail here to the confluence that looks like a great option, but was closed on this day, presumably for maintenance.

Pasque flowers: Latin for Easter, when they normally bloom

Trail art

Views of storms to the east

Rio Grand Gorge slicing north

Storms to the west

Gorge-ous

Dirt road and that New Mexico sky

Chiflo (Whistle) trail

Heading down to the river

A statement

Rio Grande and that sky

Bighorn across the river; one of several we saw today

The dogs spotted the bighorns first

Crooked tree back on the rim at La Junta Point

Daughter and I above the confluence....later in the week we'll be down there

Cebolla Mesa to Big Arsenic Spring near Taos, NM - Daughter and I took another day to hike along the Rio Grande River through its spectacular gorge. We started at the Cebolla Mesa trailhead which was at the end of a 3 mile heavily rutted dirt road west of the 522 highway. Cebolla is Spanish for onion and my daughter figured perhaps it was due to the geological layers in the gorge being like the layers in an onion. Sounds about right to me. At the trailhead we met a nice gentleman from Pennsylvania who was camping up on the rim with his two golden retrievers. He'd been living the nomad life since retiring from his nature photography job, traveling in his small RV that was towing a jeep. He had planned to be in Colorado by now, but there's been too much snow this year, so he's sticking around New Mexico until more of it melts.

The trail starts at 7,300 feet and drops to about 6,300 feet in 1.3 miles to the Rio Grande River. From here it was about a quarter mile until you reached the confluence of the Red River with the Rio Grande. There's a nice bridge across the Red River. We hung out at the confluence (aka Junta in Spanish) along with a nice couple from Missouri. After a chat and some photo-taking we headed upriver along the Rio Grande for another 3.5 miles to Big Arsenic Spring. The hiking was outstanding as it combined nice flat walks along the river with a couple of 300 foot climbs to the tops of inner-gorge mesas which contained petroglyphs from long ago. On one of our stretches along the river we spotted a huge river otter munching on something atop a rock. She would then dive into the river and pop back up on the rock to eat again (crawdads maybe or fish?). We watched her for a long time. She was maybe three feet long! Looked like a seal at first! Both Little Arsenic and Big Arsenic Springs are pretty, with green plants growing around and in the springs. There are several camp sites along the river for either backpackers or kayakers. Each of the camps have covered picnic tables and pit toilets which are pretty nice amenities out here far away from parking lots.

At the end of the trail we met two kids backpacking. One was in his 20s and the other was a teen; maybe cousins? It's always great to see young people out adventuring. They were all excited because they had just seen two "beavers" playing in the river. They were probably river otters. They were also hoping to spot some "longhorn" sheep by which they meant bighorn sheep, but that's an apt description too. There are several bighorns in this gorge even though we didn't see any on this day. We headed back after eating lunch on one of the picnic tables with a view. That last trudge up 1,000 feet to the car after already hiking 8 plus miles was rough, but it felt good to work my body that hard. Of course it was a nice easy uphill stroll for daughter who is in great shape. A great day in one of New Mexico's treasured landscapes.