Northern New Mexico in Early February - Part 1
As I mentioned a few weeks back I was headed to Albuquerque and surrounds at the end of January and beginning of February (ugghh, I can’t believe it has been that long since I blogged, some contract work has suddenly been demanding about twice the time it normally does and has left me with little time for my own work). My sister was attending the National Mastitis Council’s annual meeting which was being held in downtown. Overall we had a good time, though the first days without a car were a bit of challenge as downtown appeared to not really be open in the evenings or on the weekends aside from clubs. Though we fell totally in love with Gold Street Caffe and Tucanos!
I ended up working or working out most of the time Amber was attending short courses and talks (though I did go to the poster session and got to refresh myself on multivariate statistics from grad school). Once the conference was over though we got to do some real exploring. Though much of that was hampered by the snow that started falling when we picked up the rental car. Just a few inches of snow kind of ground a lot of things to a halt - including closing Bandelier National Monument (pics shown above and at left) and Tent Rocks National Monument.
Fortunately, our plans were somewhat flexible and we ended up driving the Turquoise Trail (along which nothing was open) which I will admit was not an enjoyable drive, even for this seasoned snow driver. Then we went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum near Old Town Santa Fe and then spent good sums of money at the shops surrounding the Plaza and mostly at the vendors along the Palace of the Governors. Then we opted to order in pizza to the hotel and make it an early night so we could hit the road to Bandelier very early the next morning. The plan was to hit both Bandalier and Tent Rocks the next day.
We were the first to enter the park that day so our plan worked! Only the Main Loop Trail was open as they only clear one trail of snow in the winter. Truthfully, I was quite glad as I didn’t feel ready to climb three stories of ladders that are part of the Alcove House trail (well, coming back down them is probably worse, but either way I welcomed the excuse to not be able to do so). There was still some ladder climbing opportunities along the Main Loop trail. There were three different cave dwellings that you could climb into and experience and that was quite unique. We were unable to take the full loop because we ran into this:
I’m pretty sure for both of us, Bandelier was the top stop for our trip, despite the drastic decrease in trail possibilities. We were done around 11am and were anxious to continue on to Tent Rocks, however the GPS had a different plan. It kept trying to direct us via National Forest Roads of which only one was open this time and year and looked to be entirely snow packed so opted to stay the course until we got to a more major highway. It ended up being a car tour of every Pueblo to the north and west of Albuquerque.
While I’m bummed we did not make it to Tent Rocks, I’m definitely glad we opted to go to Bandelier first as I think it was probably the most unique experience of the two monuments since we were able to climb into the cave dwellings and such.
