The Beauty Is In The Details — Las Cruces to Albuquerque

Today, someone asked me if New Mexico is beautiful.  Of course it is beautiful but I’m not the person to ask because, really, when it comes down to it, I find everywhere to be beautiful.  Here’s what I have to specifically say about New Mexico.  I live in the high desert of Idaho so the feel of the landscape in New Mexico didn’t thrill my senses — which is to say the terrain there did not move me too far out of the geographical parameters of my ordinary life.  That said, there is magic in New Mexico and I believe it stems from the fact that the state has really held on to a deeply reverberating Mexican/American Indian vibe that splatters the world there with color, texture and SPIRIT!  New Mexico has spirit.  Bombastic spirit.  I felt it the moment I saw my first strand of chile peppers hanging from a doorway on an adobe.  Wowee!  Everything feels a little older, a little more sunbaked, a little more crusty around the edges.  The place has patina and I adore patina.  Truly.  The beauty of New Mexico is in the sun burned, wind kissed, quirky details.

I realize that I haven’t told you what the heck I was doing down in New Mexico in the middle of the summer!   Allow me to share the background of this trip.  I travel, from time to time, with one of my best friends who is from Arizona.  In January we began to talk, in earnest, about taking another trip together this year (we’ve done trips together in the past including Northern Ireland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Idaho Sawtooths by ’73 Volkswagan Bus).  We pondered on New Orleans, San Francisco and then decided we needed to go somewhere neither of us had ever experienced and our plans for New Mexico began to grow themselves into fruition.  May rolled around and I found I had a plane ticket to Phoenix and M had booked time off.  The rest is history.

M is a talented photographer which just makes traveling together even better.  We walk around with our enormous cameras, take thousands of pictures, share our shooting secrets with each other, and laugh a lot.  I’m always amazed at how different our photography styles are.  Even if we are shooting the same landscape or retro neon sign, things turn out so differently.  We both tend to simply do exactly what we do.  I have always appreciated her eye for what it is, but also love it when I get to compare my perspective directly to hers.  If you’d like to take a peek at her work from our New Mexico adventure, you can find her blog posts here.

Have you ever traveled with a best girlfriend?

It’s the best.

Also, we hiked 800ft underground into the Carlsbad Caverns, into that incredible, terrifying, beautiful, nightmarish place.  I was practically hypothermic when we came back up to the surface, so clammy and drippy and cold was it down there.  Just ask M.  I had “white finger” on my right hand — which is what I call it when my fingers turn white and generally quit functioning, not a big deal, it happens sporadically; I get deeply cold quite easily.  Robert dreads it.

Back to the caves.  I kept expecting a gollum to pop up out of the pools of water beneath the various speleothems we encountered (that’s a fancy word for rock formations found in caverns and caves…good one, huh?).  It was quite the experience, not like anything I have ever seen before on the skin of our beautiful, wild Earth.  I would highly recommend a visit if you are in the neighborhood.  It’s a completely spectacular experience and while there are lights placed around the caves to slightly illuminate the hiking path as well as the ENORMOUS columns, stalagmite and stalactites, I cannot fathom that once upon a time, crews of men and women went under the earth with only headlamps and ropes to explore this phenomenal, dark territory.  I just can’t believe it.

My photographs don’t do the caves justice.  They are a million times more gorgeous and frightening than I could capture in pictures.  The scale, too, is lost in these shots.  I really cannot explain to you the monumental size of these rock formations.  There were delicate formations, as well, but the big ones were el mondo.

To be continued…