Colorado and New Mexico

HERE WE are, in Angel Fire, New Mexico, off the road for a few days and sleeping under a roof no less. The condo is CCjon’s haunt. It’s his stuff everywhere. Amparo, on the few occasions she’s here, is eager to get home to Houston after a week.

It’s the lap of luxury, really, for we riders of these many miles. Comrade Nestor, sporting his Che beret as we speak, is the true iron man of the bunch. I doubt I’ll ride 10,000 miles on this trek. Nestor’s logged more than 28,000. He rode from Colombia south to Ushuaia then north to Prudhoe Bay; down to the bottom of the hemisphere then up to the top.

There are five levels to the condo. Nestor’s camped down by the front door, CCjon’s two walks up, I’m in the loft with the bearskin. Yes, CCjon shot the bear. Not in the condo, I’m told. Now that would be a story…

It feels odd to sleep in a bed after a month on the ground. Way too cushy. Beds make you soft. Given that I’m technically still on the road, I decline to commit. Last night I slept on top of the bedspread, used my sleeping bag as a blanket.

So far it’s a little like the Hat Creek gang around here, we bride-less hombres left to our own sense of etiquette.

Hey, Pea Eye, it’s bad manners to go relieving yourself to the sound of people trying to eat their breakfast. Now what would your momma think?

CCjon and Nestor split out of Delta, Utah before I did. I rode solo over to Moab and found CCjon there. Nestor turned up after a while. We rode to Monticello, Utah, and set up camp on a mountaintop in the Manti-La Sal National Forest, 8,200 feet up. There were mule deer everywhere, game trails winding this way & that through an oak and aspen forest. Open range, so there were cattle in the road on the way up.

A woebegone garage in Scipio, Utah, on my way to Moab.

Back in the desert scrub. Then, before you know it, things really start to get dry.

Part of the ancient seabed in the San Rafael Swell… layers of gray shale spill out down below, limestone farther up. When you get through Moab to the farming towns south of there the soil looks pretty much like a tilled version of these formations.

Closer on the same pic…

In some places, the harder rocks tilt precariously atop the softer sediments that erode faster. There were better places to show that. It was a hot ride, I didn’t stop much to document it.

Closer look on the photo above.

When we regrouped and camped in the Manti-La Sal on Thursday eve, CCjon was planning to be the first out of camp in the morning. And he was. I heard him getting under way around 2 a.m. He was interested in riding the long way to Angel Fire, through Arizona. Nestor and I opted for the direct route through Colorado.

Colorado’s always a great ride. It’s as green as Utah is dry, even in the semi-arid southwest corner. Beautiful vistas of pine and cedar, fields of pinto beans, grass hay, corn wherever they have irrigation to support it. I talked to a gal emptying trash cans at a roadside store, she said they were way short on rain this year, most of the dryland bean farmers didn’t plant. Quite a few of the farm ponds we rode by were just algae puddles with cracked earth radiating out from the centers.

We stuck to the backroads… U.S. 491 out of Utah, Colorado 184, U.S. 160 through Durango to Pagosa Springs, U.S. 84 to Chama, New Mexico, U.S. 64 to Taos, and beyond to Angel Fire.

The New Mexico line, a look back into Colorado.

CCjon made it to Angel Fire before Nestor and I. He had a 6-hour jump on us and only 50 more miles to ride, his 420 to our 370.

Quite a storm gathered just west of Taos and the Rio Grande River Gorge. Nestor and I scooted by it with a minor pelting of the biggest raindrops you ever saw. We stopped for water and watched the storm build behind us. It arced quite a few lighting strikes to ground. I ate an apple and half a greasy summer sausage I had picked up in a store in Chama. We watched the raw sky edging toward us and Nestor said what we were both thinking, that it would soon be aqui! No alla… Gonna be here, man, not there…

It was still behind us when we got to Angel Fire. Then it played out or went somewhere else. We had rain overnight but it wasn’t the same bunch of thunderbumpers that had chased us across the flatlands west of Taos.

Sunset from here yesterday…

Tony DePaul, September 1, 2018, Angel Fire, New Mexico, USA