I’m talking about US 285 north of Tres Piedras, NM. Give it a go sometime. No camera can adequately capture what it feels like up there, but that will never keep me from trying:
Looking east toward Ute Mountain & the Sangres
This is that stretch that goes by San Antonio Mountain. We didn’t see any antelope coming back from Alamosa, CO this morning. The 16 degree temperature might have had something to do with it, though the cold didn’t appear to bother a nearby herd of horses. Sometimes you see pronghorns mixed in among cattle and horses on the open range, so we peered as hard as we could.
These scenes are roughly an hour away from the middle of Taos. We must have encountered five or six other vehicles in about 30 miles, and this was the middle of the morning on a weekeday! Virtually the entire way, there was no one ahead of or behind us. That kind of spoils a person, if you like to drive. And the vistas are simply stunning.
Mystery mist at 16 degrees
When we pass through land like this, we never play the radio or even talk much. It’s just too overwhelming. I think it changes a person, too. This stuff scrapes the flesh clean off your bones.
I may be living somewhere safe and pretty someday, enjoying the flowers and manicured gardens people cultivate to make a connection, and something will remind me of San Antonio Mountain. I’ll say something to my wife. She’ll look up from what she’s reading, flash me a quiet smile, and we’ll remember when we lived where God is the gardener and we were the dirt.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
you are SO lucky!!!!!!!! everytime i have to drive anywhere here in the SF Bay Area, even if it’s just a 10 minute run to get takeout, it always makes me nuts, and i always think to myself “i enjoy driving, if only it weren’t for all these other idiots on the road!” and that’s the real point, it’s not just that there are *so* many people driving around the area, but so many of them should *never* have been given a license in the first place! and of course you can’t help getting sucked into that whole Road Warrior/NASCAR aggressive competitive mindset everyone else seems to employ yourself simply to survive on the road. it burns me out so much and makes me envious of you out there in the middle of the Big Nowhere. and this is just the SF area; i can’t even begin to imagine how much a place like los angeles sucks even worse in comparison!
and to hell with “living somewhere safe and pretty someday”! manicured (i.e. imprisoned) nature is a sad pale shadow of the Deep Reality you get to live in the middle of every day. i long to get away from the festering pit of concentrated civilization, feeding off it’s own rotting carcass trying to maintain its crumbling illusion of reality and authority. ugh.
(i am in desperate need of having the flesh scraped clean off my bones – too much accretion of psychic crap has had me completely blocked for many years now and it depresses the hell out of me… among many other things….)
sigh .such beauty….such space…..thank you for all the stunning vistas over the years…..it makes my day, john
It IS even better in person. We were just there a couple weeks ago. You captured the image beautifully.