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.

In which there is a lot of pre-dawn fiesta fun (New Mexico part III).

One of my favorite things to do in Albuquerque is get up before sunrise (easy to do while the ol' biological clock is still set 8 hours ahead on German time), hijack a vehicle and drive a short 15ish minutes east to the cute little volcanoes perched on the edge of the valley. They're part of Petroglyph National Monument and, while I have never spotted any petroglyphs on the volcanoes themselves, I very much enjoy frequenting their hiking trails and partaking in their fantastic view over the whole of Albuquerque. 'Course it's technically not open to the public at the crack of dawn, but there's nothing and nobody to keep you from parking in the outer lot and ducking under the gate. It's best to time the trek so that you've reached volcano #1 and scrambled atop it before the light show begins. The colors progress quickly as the sun makes its ascent up the western side of the Sandia range, immediately filling the valley with golden light once it scales the peak, transforming the landscape into a world of glowing shrubbery and sharp contrasts. I very well remember my first volcano sunrise a few years ago when the sun spilled over the mountaintop and coyotes started howling somewhere in the valley below. That was the only time I heard them, and while I always hope they'll howl again at the sunshed moment, I'm also just content to sit on blackened rock formations with a thermos full of hot tea, listening to the wind.

However, there was a special thing about this morning, too, being that it took place in the midst of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. This annual event brings in hot air balloonists from all over the world, and tourists galore. When the weather is good, an average of 500 or so balloons take off at once at the morning Mass Ascension, surrounded by ca. 100,000 spectators spread out over the spacious grounds. The fiesta grounds were pretty far away and I'd forgotten to bring binoculars, so the Mass Ascension looked more like a spectacular plague of locusts from where we sat. Luckily there were some other balloonists who launched closer to our location and looked, well, more ballooney.

The rest of the day was spent in the botanical gardens, wandering around Albuquerque, and probably hiding in the shade with a sweating glass of pink lemonade once it got too hot.

"The Purest Route 66 Motel Surviving" -- surviving... what, exactly?

You have to watch your step for predator plants when walking home along rough roads and acequias.

Though even when you do, you still usually have to devote many minutes to plucking out sharp goathead thorns once you get back. This landscape is not barefoot-friendly.

The next day involved getting up even earlier to go to the Balloon Fiesta, as late risers often miss out on parking lots and have to watch the balloons go up while stuck in traffic. An additional highlight on this particular day was a lunar eclipse, turning the moon an eerie dark red.

We arrived in time for parking and made our way onto the freezing cold fiesta grounds. Fair food delicacies such as corn dogs, cheese curds, breakfast burritos, and "New Mexico's Own Grilled Cheese Donut With Bacon" were already in high demand. Unfortunately the weather was still too shifty to decide the fate of the Mass Ascension, and we would have to wait a couple hours for the sun to rise and warm up the air to see if it would worsen or improve. A few balloons inflated for a short morning glow and dawn patrol, probably just to give the spectators something to cheer about while feeling freezy and queasy from the predawn coffee and cheese curds. A couple balloons took off and were quickly zoomed away by uncomfortably strong winds. The first balloon to launch was the one promoting Wicked, the musical. Maybe that one ended up in Kansas, just to mix things up a bit.

The sun eventually made a cloudy appearance as we walked around the enormous fabric masses of 2D balloons. Pilots make the final decision about whether or not to fly, and many packed up and left as the morning progressed. We listened to one pilot explain the weather situation to whoever wanted to listen, thereby learning some of the official rules of aviation and hearing some unfortunate but after-the-fact-silly stories about pilots who got into trouble in various ways. He had also decided not to fly that day.

As the official ascension was still on hold (yellow flag a-fluttering in the breeze, as opposed to green or red), we wandered around various tents featuring everything from NASA info to chainsaw carving competitions (carving with chainsaws, as opposed to carving chainsaws) until a quick glimpse toward the launching fields yielded a happy sight indeed. I had been wanting to experience this every year since my parents moved to Albuquerque (not to mention all those tantalizing photos and timelapses = srsly, watch that one), and to have finally made it there at the right time from thousands of miles away just to have a little wind cancel the show would have been saddening.

So, green flag = good news! For all the pilots that had left by that point, I was still totally amazed at how many balloons there still were, and how more and more and more and more just kept going up. It was grand to be there in the middle of all the action, and the organization of the whole thing was superb. Bewhistled persons in various black and white striped outfits ran around giving out the OK to launch and clearing out all the spectators from the flight path just before takeoff, and fast. Balloons were going up simultaneously all over the place and, to my knowledge, didn't whack anybody on the head on the way up or collide with any other bloated, fire-breathing beast once airborne. And did I mention how huge they are? But enough geblabber, here are some pictures:
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Dad was particularly excited to see this fractal balloon, remembering it from previous years. Now let's jump ahead a few weeks -- I'm in Hamburg and just threw my coat on over my PJs to mail something at the post office next-door. I'm standing in line looking absentmindedly at the various calendars and notebooks on display, and, hello, suddenly a picture of THIS BALLOON (and others) is grinning at me from the shelf, the cover picture of some sort of celebrate-life-themed calendar. Very much like a small world experience in which someone from a distant realm of your life is standing in front of you, waiting for you to notice them in a 100% unexpected place. If you're not expecting to see them, it might take a while for recognition to sink in, aaand then it's ridiculous when it does. Not that I had some sort of intimate experience with this balloon in my past, but still, it was fun and surprising to see it there in my local post office. In Germany.

Now back in October in New Mexico.

So that was fun. ...In other breaking news: it's snowing! As in, right now, in Germany. The kind that turns everything white and sparkly. Maybe it will stick around for a while, but more likely it will get drizzled into oblivion once the temperature rises back above freezing. But for now, delight!