Maybe I can do this after all. It only took me eighteen years of living in Taos, most of them spent less than ten miles from this spot, but I did find it. It’s a stupefying place. The scale and closeness of the cliffs are shocking. The open space between them is too much to [...]
hiking
Photo from May 3rd this year
This is where we walk. Taos Valley Overlook is 2,581 acres (about four square miles) of sagebrush, piñon, junipers, rocks, arroyos, mesas, and cliffs. Today we walked almost three miles and only encountered a couple of cyclists. It takes about ten minutes to get here from where we live. One could do worse!
I bitch a lot but this is just ten minutes from the house
My heart rate was pushing one hundred thirty-two beats per minute near the top of the hill. I thought that was a bit much, but nothing burst. She flew on ahead the way she always does, sometimes with her arms stretched out like wings. (I can beat her on a bike, but that’s it.) There [...]
Dead tarantula with flattened body. Probably run over by a bike.
The subject here is art fear, and I just remembered something else. Among my youthful talents was that I sometimes wrote things. There was this nature magazine, not one of the well-known ones, that I’d come by in my adventures. I had a subscription. One month there was an advertisement for a national essay contest. [...]
That’s Lobo Peak in the distance. I want to hike up there soon.
Oh, it’s hard sometimes, knowing which way to go. My sister just had an operation on her trachea to manage a cancer scare. She’s in a hospital in Dallas and doing fine, but I’ve lost one sister already to liver cancer, and this makes me stumble. My wife will need a troubling operation on her [...]
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