Sidetracked Charley

The Sangre de Cristos   I drove to the market yesterday for avocados. It was Thursday before the Memorial Day invasion. The tourist season comes on Harley Davidson motorcycles decked out in their leathers. Supposedly they are "celebrating" a war I marched to end. I usually just hide away in my Black Lake home and try to shut my ears as they roar down Hwy 434. The rest of the tourist season will be quieter but also not welcome. This year I feel like a tourist. I have just returned from exile in neighboring Eagle Nest. I have been an evacuee for 12 days. I have been glad to be back in Black Lake on the land I love but it has not yet felt like home. I feel like a cat on a hot tin roof. Thicke, my cat, has settled in better than me. I stand in my studio and pace trying to figure what to do next. I come up with a plan to unpack this or rearrange that. Move a few things then abandon it.  I had planned to go to Taos and stock up with groceries for the invasion, and go by Ace Hardwar...

Calf Canyon/Kermits Peak Breathing   I am home now. That does not mean the fire which chased me away is out. There are times I think I can hear it breathe. I know where it lives. Where it sleeps when the winds are still. I watch the horizons in the morning as the winds begin to pick up. Every white puff in the sky gets queried. Are you a cloud? Or smoke. Forest fires lie down at night but they are alive in the pine needles covering the forest floor. Alive in the huge log emerging from the melting snow. And alive in the roots of the burned spar above the snow. All it takes is wind to bring them out of hiding and wake up the fire. We have had a quiet few days but the Fire Weather begins again today. A forest fire is not like a house fire on your street. It cannot be drowned out with a pumper full of water. It isn't easily surrounded and watched. The perimeter of the Calf Canyon and Kermits Peak Fire is 600 miles. It covers portions of five counties. It has compromised several state r...

So many improvements and memories. So many losses. This the deck I built and standing on it is Magique who I lost. The lost pets are many. Google and Facebook remind me constantly. Some memories are good. Some so sad. I was just beginning this gardening year when the fire began on Kermit Peak. It was to be my second vrbo year and but beginning slowly. I was happy to have ample time to work on the gardens when Mora was evacuated. I invited homeless friends to stay in the empty rental. A frolic. Soon they would be able to go back home. Two weeks later I was ordered to evacuate. Kate had asked how long before she could go home and I didn't know. I did not know how long before I got to go home. I had a place to go. To stay with a friend in a near by town. It would be a lark. Soon I would be back here in my home of 30 years of memories. Today it hit me it would be more than a weekend when I had to fill out a temporary change of address. Suddenly I was discussing all the truly difficult ...

Black Lake, NM   This view welcomed me home in my traveling days with art fairs. This was my view as I emerged from Guadalupita canyon, home of Coyote Creek, and I am sorry to say I do not know this mile marker. I always know mile markers. I was the navigator when my family traveled. I had a notebook and kept important notes. Maybe not always for my family but important for me. Other kids had to memorize their address and telephone number incase they got lost but in the beginning for me, living in the Missouri countryside or the a New Mexico air base it was the turns I would have to make to get home or my father's name, rank and serial number. I discovered when accidently abandoned outside of Liberal, Kansas during a trip at Christmas the license plate number was important. The highway patrol officer was impressed. Also important for me when we traveled about the country was how long. How long would we be at this base, this camp, this trip, this school. When I moved to Black Lake I...

I live in an unincorporated area of Colfax County. Black Lake is a recognized area of that county and the farthest from the county seat of Raton. In fact I am closer to Taos and Mora. I routinely get summoned for jury duty in Mora and have to deline. I do my grocery shopping in Taos. I have been assigned the Angel Fire Zip Code. And get my mail on my rural route through Ocate which is in Mora. My legal address is Black Lake, NM 87710 and because of that Angel Fire Zip code designation everyone from my short term rental agency to UPS and Google tags me with Angel Fire. That actually works in my favor when it comes to short term rental occupancy because nobody books vacations in Raton. Since the coal mines closed they have been slowly dying. The current population of Raton is now 5734, down from 9000 and still declining. Its current source of income is county offices. We drive two hours to respond to jury duty of apply for licenses. Which is what they want me to do. The whole county ...

From the Top of Spyglass Hill Went looking for signs of winter this morning. Drove past the base of the ski resort and no sign of any snow making activity. It was 28 this morning but do not know when it reached that temp. The NOAA forecast for the next seven days shows no snow. And for the fun of it I clicked on Wunderkind's November projection. None there either. I had a property and pets to check on at the top of Spyglass Hill. From experience I knew there was a nice view of the ridge of the Sangre de Cristos. If you look carefully there are a couple tiny white spots on the tallest peak. This is south facing and the days have been cloudless and in the 50's. Today is forecast for 58 f and tomorrow 61! Seemed a good day for a drive so I headed down the road to the Coyote Creek and Black Lake. Yes, there is a Black Lake. It is what is left of a huge peat bottom lake mostly rich meadow now. The Black Lake The first thing I noticed as a resident of the area is that the cattle are ...

I live in rural America. And I love it here. I even most times love what I do not have because I choose to live outside cities. But some of the things I do not have cause problems defining where I live. I do not have a zip code. I borrow neighboring zip codes depending on who is asking. In the United States of America a zip code is five or nine numbers that are added to a postal address to assist the sorting of mail. There are about 43,000 zip codes. They are attached to post offices which the USPS wants to reduce. Post Offices are attached largely to cities these days. Once Black Lake had a post office and our zip code I am told was 87734. But the USPS deleted that post office because there was no city but just a large rural area with farms and ranches and people like myself which loved living in rural areas.  When the Black Lake post office was closed the zip code was moved to Ocate, NM which is over the mountain and through the canyon and most notably in an entire other county. ...

  A wonderful gray day that was hideously cold with a biting wind. Fortunately I have mastered the art of taking photographs out of the window of the car. You can even use the window up and down as a tripod of sorts. So after heading north toward Eagle Nest to procure the fresh farm raised eggs from the new chicks, I turned Spock south to the land of the lonesome Dove. I have a series of four pull off's from Hwy 434 which give me a good view of what movie makers thought looked like Montana for the Lonesome Dove. To me they look like the New Mexico where I grew up. The mountain range is the Sangre de Cristos which lie in the far north of the state between Taos and Angel Fire. Wheeler Peak is the tallest but it depends where you are standing as to which looks the tallest. Old Mike usually is mistaken for Wheeler. Today the clouds kept changing the light. I was surprised to find the cattle in the valley of Black Lake. These must have wintered in. Truck loads of cattle generally arrive...

BoBear  at the Pond's Edge   Smoke is blanketing my valley from the fires all around my state and just south in Santa Fe but it rained and I thought if I was quick I could get out on an early morning photography trek with my dog. You just had to be careful which way you pointed the camera. Avoid most shots with a sky line especially pointing south. The sky was white in that direction and all the hills in shades of gray. But pond reflections were blue. And toward that direction the colors were more true. It was also easier to breathe if you walked into the woods and away from the smoke filled valley. But the white sky offered a great backdrop to the dark forest. So in conclusion BoBear and I had a nice walk but I came home to my house in the Valley of the Little Coyotes with a cough and a headache, but some good photographs.  See my other Blog, Creative Journey for the black and white versions of the smokey hills. 

Never have been overly fond of the end of the year. Or for that matter the beginning of the new one. There seem to be so many unmet expectations from the "Joy of the Season" to all those new resolutions to be a better self. To which is added looming taxes, the flu season, awful weather, and removal of all coping mechanisms like our favorite shows so they can rerun Charlie Brown's Christmas, schedule all the bowl games, and make space for poorly scripted award shows. Feeling weepy yesterday I threw the camera in the truck and went in search of ice to photograph. There was none. I had unconsciously noticed it just did not seem to be as cold this December to January, but that was a judgement made on what winter coats are hanging on the entry hooks. The Coretex coat for the Arctic which I wore constantly last winter is still in the upstairs closet. And any hopes, that while my yard was not covered with snow, certainly the mountains were getting it was dashed by this pho...

It is that time of year when all the cattle moves down to where they were dumped off last spring. We are a summer pasturing area. And most privately owned fields are connected by opened gates to public grazing lands. In the middle of summer all the cows and their calves are at the top of the mountains. And then by some signal only they know they start to head down. About the same time, and maybe to the same obscure signal the birds begin to gather and head through to the south. The snow is a bit unusual for this early in October. The water isn't frozen and as soon as the sun comes up the snow will melt into the ground. But this morning the snow covered the gold grass and the fog cloaked the mountains altering the familiar landscape of my mountain neighborhood. I wasn't dressed for the cold or the damp nor am I mentally prepared for winter which waits in the wings rather impatiently. I was happy to see the sun.

Front porch this week At broadcast time it is a minus 30.3 outside and I have just proven that warm coffee tossed into the air will become a brown mist instantly. Such things are important to know. For me this morning it means I am not going outside until the sun comes up. The temperature is forecast to rise to a positive 21 degrees, which after being in the single digits or below for the last three days, will be positively balmy. And no the snow has not melted off, but the 15 inches we received has compacted and/or evaporated because of the cold to about 7 inches. Chatting on line to friends in other parts of the country I have found a lot of misunderstandings about New Mexico. Even the national news was saying this huge storm went from Texas to Maine. We're the void to the west of Texas. And a whole group of people think New Mexico is desert. So I Googled up a satellite map this morning of my part of the state. There is an awful lot of errors. Google got the name of only on...

I drove down through what used to be the township of Black Lake yesterday. Yes, Martha, there is a Black Lake. And there used to be a town. It was a thriving community of ranchers in the late 1800's and early 1900's. This area had been homesteaded in that time by primarily the Trujillo family. Per the 1861 homestead act you could get deeded to you 160 acres if you worked the land for 10 years and made improvements. The menfolk of the Trujillo extended family did and then joined them together into a very large ranch. In the town of Black Lake - or what remains of it is an old school that is used for little art fairs, the UU Bar Ranch - which was used for filming all the Montana scenes for Lonesome Dove, Poorboy's bar and dance hall - now closed because of the death of the owner, and various adobe and log buildings that have been melting into the landscape. Us locals that live in "Black Lake" as opposed to Angel Fire have various inside jokes as to where we live he...