In which New Mexico casts its spell (part I).

Enough time has passed since being home in July that most of the little details have faded. What's left are these pictures, with all the sights, smells, and flavors of memory they evoke. It's now December in Hamburg, with temperatures teetering on the freezing point and Christmas markets wafting their Glühwein-scented good cheer around dark street corners. This trip feels like forever ago, though really it was only about four months. My current setting is just so different, and the wild, New Mexico landscape seems all the more otherworldly when revisited through this lens of a few full months, and some 5000+ miles of space.   

Quick recap: After a night in Boston and almost a week with family in the humid lushness that was Indiana/Michigan, my parents, Hamburg friend, and I flew southwest to Albuquerque and got settled into the parental casa and casita. A "monsoon season"-y storm was brewing and swallowed up the sky just after taking the 3-legged wonderspaniel for a walk. There wasn't much rain to show for it in the end though, and the drought continued unquenched for another day.

It had been about a year and a half since my last trip to the Land of Enchantment (and then for only 3 days) and I was itching to do my favorite hike: the volcano sunrise. I always like to do it at the beginning of the trip when jetlag is still working in my favor (waking up early is easy when your body thinks it's 8 hours later), though it was a bit rougher this time because of having been in the States for a week already. It was pretty cloudy when friend and I got up pre-dawn, which can be hit or miss when it comes to sunrise quality. Last time it had been a miss (rain, sigh), but most of the times before had turned out to be varying degrees of spectacular (like this one or that one time or, hey Asa, that sky!). This day presented a few minutes of knockout yum before the sun disappeared into the layer of clouds above the Sandias.

You can tell when the sun is about to crest over the mountaintops by the approaching stripe of hot pink desert in the distance, where it has already touched down. 

And once it does clear the mountain, the whole valley is flooded with a flat, golden light within seconds, illuminating everything but the long, volcano-shaped shadows.

 

As always in ABQ, many hot air balloons were taking off in the distance, getting in an early morning ride before the heat of the day. 

The light show over and bodies ready for breakfast, we wandered through the bunny-studded shrubs back to the car, and traded the expansive desert landscape for hot chocolate and breakfast burritos at a heavily air-conditioned diner on nearby Route 66.

As a friend was visiting, many of our adventures included best-of-intro-to-the-great-american-southwest locations where I have been many times but also want my friends to see. The next hike on the to-do list was Tent Rocks, which we drove to early the next morning with hopes of beating the heat. It was mid-morning by the time we arrived and already getting hot, though still dark and cool between the close walls of the slot canyon.

We reached the top of the mesa and in the glory of the full sun and ate our sandwiches with a killer view while smearing on sunscreen and chugging water. Pasty northern thing that I am, I couldn't take the sun for long and was soon hiking back down amidst the shadows of the junipers and hoodoos.

The Mighty French Poodle rises!
No, really, look at this undeniably poodle-shaped profile:

By the time we got back to the car (and released the furnace within it), it was still pretty early in the day, so we decided to adventure over to Madrid on about 40 miles of freshly-paved to never-paved roads. We were also getting low on water and were relieved to finally come across a convenience store that could sell us drinkables.

Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid, coal town gone bust, turned colorful artist colony) was having a sleepy kind of day. We ended up chatting with quite a few people, local artists and other tourists, and inevitably had trouble answering the first question that always came up -- "Where you from?". (Well, Germany I guess, though he's actually French, but my parents are in Albuquerque so I've been here a few times before, his first time though, but I actually grew up in Maine so this is still pretty exotic for me...). We poked around for a bit, then got some homemade Mexican hot chocolate gelato (and vanilla caramel green chili gelato, because yolo), and headed down the Turquoise Trail along the eastern side of the Sandias, back home.

The day wasn't over yet though. Once back in Albuquerque, we picked up the parentals and headed back to the mountains, where we dined on New Mexican cuisine while watching a huge rainstorm water the west, dropping to the earth in a funnel-like fashion.

Then, of course, we took the cable car up the mountain as the sun turned the cliffs sandia-pink, and watched it set most dramatically over the city, leaving a lightning show in tow.

Welcome to New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.