I got up yesterday at 5:30am and drove up to the ski hill, arriving just as the sun rose over the Sangres. I had packed then night before, but i neglected to take the PB&J sandwiches out of the fridge, so my diet for the entire hike was apples, granola, and raisins.
Quemazon trail was closed for awhile after the Cerro Grande fire, and to make sure people didn't try to go there, they piled boulders and dead trees all over the first few hundred meters of the trail. Now those boulders and trees have been pushed to the side and the trail is marked with treadmarks from the caterpillar used to do it.
Quemazon skirts around the base of a mountain that is not named on my map, and then runs between it and the neighboring (also unnamed) mountain. For the sake of easy description, we'll assign them creative names like Mountain 1 and Mountain 2. So, inbetween mountains 1 and 2, the trail runs into a huge open meadow, about two kilometers long and several hundred meters wide. This meadow is actually called "Meadow 1" but for the sake of creativity we'll refer to it as "Caņada Bonita."
Caņada Bonita had pine trees here and there, but mostly it was just full of wild irises and dandelions. By the time I had hiked there, the sun was still low enough in the sky to be obscured by Mountain 2, so I got to watch the sun rise again here. This was all very serene until I noticed I was standing right next to a huge elk skeleton whose neck and head had been separated from the rest of its body. And there's something un-serene about that.
Rounding the far side of Mountain 2, Quemazon meets up with "Pipeline Road," a road which leads to this ridge from Los Alamos and follows a buried gas pipeline. At one point, the road goes right next to a cliff facing west, looking out over part of the caldera.
Trail 282 branches off from Pipeline Road and follows the ridge between the caldera and Guaje Canyon. Just before descending into the canyon, the trail goes out along a high peninsula which sticks out into the canyon, and at the end there is a rocky prominence which gives a fantastic view of upper Guaje.
The trail turns and goes down switchbacks into the canyon before the end of the peninsula, but climbing out onto the rocks is easy. As I climbed farther out along the point, the sides became steeper and steeper and the rock narrower until I was on a big flat slab of rock about 10' square, and on three sides the ground dropped away about 250'.
There was a great songbird somewhere nearby that I couldn't see. It's song was extremely complex and it was hard to not think of it as some sort of fully-articulate language. It sounded a lot like someone had scrambled a birdsong for security reasons. Maybe the bird was a spy.
The morning sun was warming the rocks and creating thermals for birds to play in. I was surrounded by a group of swallows that were thermalling on the sunny side of the peninsula, then shooting across and doing acrobatics on the cool side, then flying around and doing it all over again. They clearly weren't feeding or doing anything useful, they were just playing around.
The birds had black tops and heads, white undersides, and a white stripe around the base of their tail. The most distinguishing characteristic, however, was the irridescent green patches between their necks and tails on their backs. As they soared in the sunlight, they would turn to just the right angle and suddenly they would be bright mettalic green. [I looked them up when I got home; they are tree swallows.]
I sat there and watched the birds for a long time. And after awhile it became clear that they had grown curious about me. They were flying within a few feet of me and as they shot past they would turn their heads and look at me. A few of them got more courageous and would fly straight towards my head, then flare their wings and stall about three feet from me. For a breif moment, the bird was basically stationary in front of me - so close I could almost touch it. And I could see its little eyes looking me over, head tilting to the side. Maybe I'm just personifying too much into their behavior. But I felt like an animal at the zoo and the little kids were trying to figure out what my deal was. It was the most amazing sensation - to come face to face with the consciousness of another animal in the wild. It's something you get from pets all the time, but I've never been in the wild before and had an animal clearly come up to me to examine me.
They didn't exhibit any fear of me, just a sense of great curiosity. And as their airspeed dropped to zero, they would turn and heave off with their wings and fly away. I could hear the sound of the air catching in their wings like little sails finding a new breeze, and sometimes a little squeek of exertion as they pushed to regain their airspeed.
The experience was so magical that I just sat there with the birds for a couple hours. It was one of the most supremely peaceful moments of my life. Nothing but the sound of the wind in the pines, the songbird, and the tree swallows.
Eventually I felt very rested and left the birds to continue the hike. My destination, Caballo Mountain, was clearly visable across the canyon.
I worked my way down the switchbacks alongside the peninsula, which was very painful on the toes. In the canyon, the character of the trail changed dramatically, shrinking to only about 1' wide and working its way through high underbrush.
The center of the canyon was occupied by a gentle stream which had pooled up into a sort of swampy morass in several areas. I had to cross the stream, luckily at a more stream-like than morass-like region. Reaching the intersection between Guaje Canyon Trail 282 and the summit trail (Caballo Trail 277), I was beginning to notice the density of thorn bushes alongside the trail. There was no way to avoid touching them, and I had no pants. So my calves were really getting torn up.
Eventually, I had to turn around because of this inadequate legware. Besides, the specter of having to ascend the 1400' to Caballo, only to turn around and descend again and then come back up the 1000' out of Guaje canyon was a real demoralizer. It's probably a good thing I turned around, too, because the ascent out of the canyon was brutal. I had to stop every 100' or so and let my heart cool down. The air at 9500' is just too thin for my Boston lungs. I have not yet fully acclimated, and that left me wheezing and dizzy.
Eventually I made it back up to the top of the peninsula and started the trek back towards the ski hill, but my legs and feet were now complaining vigorously. Every little incline, even just a few degrees, made me break out in sweat and start gulping for air. So I'm a big un-physically-fit wuss, I admit it. But I'm working on it.
Walking back was different for two reasons. One, the temperature had risen about 20 degrees and it was not officially "hot." Second, the sun was now high in the sky and everything looked different.
I saw a hummingbird up on the ridge near Pipeline road, and numerous giant moths. Apparently, it is butterfly season. They were everywhere. In places I would walk through the grass and clouds of them would be disturbed. At one point I got a great closeup view of a big moth eating from a dandelion. I could see his little spirally mouth thing that I had only seen before on TV.
Returning finally to the car, after 6 hours of hiking, I was exhausted. Great hike tho. And without the descent into the canyon, would have been pretty easy. I'll definitely come back here from time to time and hang out with my tree swallow buddies.
