Centering

Hiking out here is like having a couple hours off-duty from your flying saucer on another planet. So beautiful and dangerous. It’s over six hundred feet down from this location on the Rio Pueblo, at least eight hundred on the Rio Grande. The trail to get to this spot runs along the edge of the cliff for hundreds of yards at a time, no place for big stupid dogs or wild children. It’s a double-track trail, what I’d call an old jeep road, and I usually hug the inside path. Even with the distance above the river, you can hear the roar of water crashing over rocks like high desert surf. That’s Pueblo land over there, that looming mass to the west (right). The exposed Precambrian rock is over a billion years old.

We watched a small herd of bighorn sheep on the other side of the chasm, grazing on a grassy slope at the very edge of oh-my-god. You can spot them by their big white butts that shine in the sun. I was concerned that I might spook them, even at that distance, and that one of them might fall. Projection, no doubt. But they could surely hear us in the still, dry air and eventually shifted just enough to put some trees between us.