Hello again. :) Welcome to more tales of my recent trip to New Mexico, my favorite state, and my adopted home.
Usually when I get back I'm super eager to share and I get everything together right away. I kept wondering why I was putting off the trip journalling. I think maybe it's just that this trip was a healing trip for me, and the whole time I was very selfish about it. When I type that I want to erase it and make it sound less harsh, but then I remember...it's ok to be selfish sometimes. This was one of the times I needed to be. Luckily, there were some amazing people around me who made that possible.
The above picture shows my first night accomodations in New Mexico. We went to Water Canyon after our pizza dinner with Kija and set up a tent. At the time I was a bit overtired and thought "soft bed or cold ground? soft bed or cold ground?" but in the end, I'm really glad it was cold ground. I don't think there's ever a nicer way to wake up then *smelling* the morning, or feeling the sun start to warm the tent and hearing the sounds of night fade into the sounds of daytime.
Also? I may not be a morning person, but when THIS is what you see when you first wake up, you have to be in a bit of a better mood than you were before. The other thing that was nice about being here the first night was that this is a VERY familiar place for me. We went camping here with a few different groups of people, and drove up here even more. It's just a few minutes out from Socorro. It was nice to get out of the tent, breathe in the piney air, and feel just a little bit of ownership of the place.
There were groves of freshly budded cottonwoods and we played around inside Water Canyon for a little bit after breakfast.
One thing I love about travelling with Lewis is that he's an exploring type. Always willing to check out what's behind that tree or in that culvert. Always willing to make interesting trilling noises echo through the whole thing. Makes life more fun.
This was my home. I used to have dreams that perfectly recalled the shapes of all these mountains, and what it looked like in the canyons. For a long time after I moved back I would dream of driving back into Socorro, and driving out to Magdalena, and camping up in the canyon. It was really good to have that back, even for a little bit.
Next on the list of "Old Haunts" was Box Canyon. I think this one's my favorite to roll around in for a few reasons: Back when I had a Jeep, we took it offroading out here, as well as Bill's Jeep quite a few times. It's a long trail, Box Canyon's nice and dramatic, and there's random cows and horses roaming. There's an old mine to explore, and it's really, really not the suburbs. Which I think was probably the first thing I loved. Being 40 miles out, no cell phone service. It's scary if you're not smart about it, but it's incredibly freeing too.
We were usually on the trail through, and not up on the sides of the Box, so this was time to get acquainted with the area in a different way.
Lewis, the fearless tour guide. Being majestic.
This here is a picture of 10 in the morning on a Friday. This is also the moment I felt the rush. I wasn't in a cubicle, I wasn't in IL at all. I forgot about the things that had made me run here, and just thought about here. Endless horizons, crazy blue skies, sun on your shoulder here. Great heights here.
Lewis and I crawled into some caves on one side of the Box that I'd never been in before. My lungs burned from "first day at altitude" problems, but I didn't care so much.
In this picture, we use Lewis to show scale. Hi Lewis, thanks for the point of reference!
*sigh*
Out on that horizon? Well...that's where we were headed next, after lunch.
By the way, be on the lookout, because I'm setting up Flickr sets for these entries from here on out. There's absolutely no way on Earth to fit all the gorgeous into a blog post without writing an epic. :)
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