Happy New Year!

Happy New Years everyone - here is to a happy, healthy, and blessed 2023!

Marc

End of Year

I had an idea for some photos - it has some promise, but it was a bit too cold and windy outside to really make this work well. I know what I need to do for the next time, though!

In the meantime, enjoy some photos of my favorite people.

Cheers!

Marc

Moonshot

I hope this one turns out for the blog. I found out that the moon was going to occult Mars tonight. After Leah took me for a drive around the Range, I got the camera out and got to watch the moon block Mars from view.

In this photo, some clouds had just passed, blocking the moon. You can just barely see Mars to the bottom left of the moon. This was taken just minutes before more clouds blocked the moon which blocked Mars from view. Weird.

Cheers!

Marc

Star Trails over the Organ Mountains

I was up a bit early this morning, and since there were no clouds, I made my way to a fair viewpoint of the Organ Mountains to photograph the stars. I decided I wanted to play around with some star trails. This looks a bit better in photoshop than on the web, but still pretty decent. 

Cheers,

Marc

Wintry Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Catherine made us a great meal for Thanksgiving - no surprises there. We played it pretty low key for the day. Today, we woke up to clouds and snow on the mountains. It has been snowing on and off all day at altitude, only once did it spit some snow at us, but nothing stuck around here.

When sunset came around, the skies lit up. Enjoy!

Marc

Portrait time

I did some reorganizing of my photos this weekend, and noticed it had been quite some time since I shot some photos of the family. So I set up shop outside after dark, and coerced everyone to come on out and stand in front of the flashes.

I also snapped a photo of Leah in her Halloween outfit - Little Red Riding Hood.

Ian took a quick break from his games.

Catherine really didn't want a photo, but I'm glad I got her in front of the camera.

Cheers,

Marc

Fast Clouds

As I was brewing beer this morning, I noticed that the clouds were just zipping along with the wind, which was blowing hard. I encouraged Leah to shoot some video.

She did not. But I did - I had about 15 minutes before my next brew step, so I set up along our fence and shot some video.

Otherwise, nothing terribly new here.

Cheers,

Marc

(Moto) Mountain Main 2022, Part 3

We took a back way into Colorado, which made for an interesting ride. Our destination was Mesa Verde National Park, where we would spend two nights - one camping, one in the lodge. We had a great lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Cortez (street tacos with an amazing hot sauce) and then went to check in at the campground. We still had plenty of daylight, so we rode south into the park to see the sights.

The next day we got up to ride the Million Dollar Highway, but took the long way around to get there. The San Juan National Forest between Cortez and Telluride was amazing. It looked to me like they were just past peak color!

It was a several hour ride just to get to Telluride, but traffic was low and the views were amazing. We eventually rode the stretch between Ouray and Silverton, the Million Dollar Highway, which did not disappoint. Unfortunately, it was a busier stretch of highway with no real pullouts, so I do not have any photos of that stretch. Trust me, it was rugged and beautiful.

We spent the night at the lodge in Mesa Verde National Park. The next morning we packed our bikes and rode to Chama, NM to ride the highway we followed in the train from 2-3 weeks ago. We went north from there and made our way to Great Sand Dunes National Park. 

That took us to our last camping night, in New Mexico. We originally planned to camp at Eagle Nest Lake State Park, but detoured 10-15 miles to Cimarron Canyon State Park, which had trees and a pretty little river right next to the sight, complete with trout.

We went to bed with a weather forecast showing 30% chance for rain, but not starting until 9 or 10. I awoke at 5 and on a whim checked the weather, 30% chance for heavy snow, starting now. I checked the radar, and we were in for it, no way to avoid it.

So we packed up our bikes in a good deal of haste, said a hasty good-bye (Jason headed east, I headed south). My route took me up in elevation, and unfortunately the rain did turn to snow. That was the sketchiest ride ever. Several times I thought I should turn around, but all routes out of Eagle Nest go up, meaning snow. So I stayed the course, knowing my road would head downhill and with the loss of elevation that snow would turn to rain, which it eventually did. But it was still really cold and stayed cold (low 40's without windchill) until I was 2.5 hours away from home on a 7-hour ride, along with rain along the way.

That's it for this year's Mountain Man adventure. Cheers,

Marc

(Moto) Mountain Man 2022, Part 2

We dodged rain almost all the way to the Utah state line, catching the tail end of a couple of showers, but we finally made it. Since we arrived a day earlier than planned, we went to Valley of the Gods for a night of camping. There were people all around, but all more than 200 yards away.

The next morning we laid out our wet gear and let them dry in the warm Utah sun - which was a pretty quick affair. We then drove the gravel/dirt/sand road the long way through the Valley of the Gods, the low part in the photo, below.

We rode up the Moki Dugway, a road that climbs the edge of the mesa, which was surprisingly busy!

From there, we rode towards Monument Valley and stopped to get the Forrest Gump photo - where he stopped running.

We stayed a night in Mexican Hat in a hotel, followed by a night of camping at Goosenecks State Park. The river is 1200 feet below the rim, coming in the top left of the photo and exiting bottom right. 

The stars were fantastic here. Incredibly dark skies meant we could see the Milky Way clearly, before the moon rose. Aside from that, it was flat and rocky at the top. We camped at the very edge of the cliffs - you had to watch that step after dark!

Next up - Colorado.

Cheers,

Marc

(Moto) Mountain Man 2022, Part 1

It's that time of year again - Mountain Man adventures with my friend, Jason. I have been posting short blogs here since the first adventure to Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in WV back in 2015. Since then, we've done these every year in the October/November time frame with only one exception. I apparently didn't blog anything last year, but we did some exploring here in NM.

Every year, we do something a bit different - Dolly Sods was a two night backpacking loop; New York (Escarpment Trail) was a three night straight through, with cars parked at opposite ends; Kentucky was the Red River Gorge where we introduced some car camping with some longer day hikes; North Carolina was a mix of car camping and backpacking; COVID had us looking for someplace closer to home which we found in Pennsylvania. This year, the big change was we would both be camping off of our motorcycles. Since we would be camping in bear country, we opted for no overnight food and included a couple of hotels for showers and such.

We started close to home (for me) in the Truth or Consequences area. While I was counting on the desert to do desert things not in the monsoon season, I was to be bitterly disappointed. It rained basically the whole time!

We did a short day ride in and out of the rain on our first day, but managed to snag some dry firewood at a gas station/grocery store not far from the campground and enjoyed a nice fire before the rains set in (again).

We watched the weather and saw that it was going to keep raining forever (not an exaggeration at this point!) in NM, so we abandoned/modified our plans and decided to head west into Arizona a day early. We again played hide and go seek with the rain on the way, but it did eventually clear.

You can see from the video, below, that there was more than a little bit of rain. We encountered four of these flooded roads in NM in the final 10-12 miles before the AZ state line. None had more than a couple of inches of water (you could see the center line all the way through the water across the entire water "hazard"), so we giggled like a couple of school kids and rode through them all multiple times. Fun!

We drove through two big mining operations that day, but the one in Arizona was just staggering. We made it through that and found a free campground in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest (Granville campground) which we had to ourselves for an hour, then had another person drive in. Thankfully, they were quiet and set up a long way from us - we basically had the place to ourselves.

We enjoyed a fire there, but a passing rainstorm had us duck for cover before the wood completely burned out - so it was an early night. We got up the next day and packed our wet gear, knowing we were headed to the desert of southeast Utah - which was practically guaranteed to be dry. We rode the amazing Coronado Trail (Hwy 191) to Alpine. Along the way we rode into drizzle and fog, along with some crazy cold temps - but the ride was fantastic!

Next up - Utah.

Cheers,

Marc

Jemez Springs, Valles Caldera National Preserve, and Bandelier National Monument

We had rain the next morning, which worked out well since we slept in. We ended up lounging around the hotel to wait out the rain, but played hide and seek with it for the rest of the day.

We headed west to Jemez Springs, a little town/village we passed through yesterday. We had a nice lunch, and then checked out the Jemez Springs Historic Area - some old ruins from when the Spanish were making trouble for the Jemez Pueblo people. They run the historic area, which was a nifty 30 minutes to explore.

Just up the road about a mile we hopped out to check out Soda Dam. There is a (hard to see in this photo) waterfall in the lower right corner, coming out through the terrace/landform. It is right off the road, so hard to miss.

We continued up into the mountains where it was on again-off again with the rain. We eventually made it to Valles Caldera National Preserve - a 12-mile wide dormant volcanic caldera. It last erupted a million years ago, blanketing the area in up to 1000 feet of ash - said to be 600 times more violent than the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980.

There really isn't much to see from a day-trip perspective, but there was a storm brewing which made the lighting fantastic. I haven't done anything in Photoshop or Lightroom with these photos, but am looking forward to seeing what I can pull from these. 

After dodging some lightning and hail, we drove down to Bandelier National Monument. We got there right before the Visitor Center closed, but we made it.

We did the 1.5 mile loop trail that took us up to these old cliff dwellings. The Ancestral Puebloans had some multi-story housing built into the cliffs. The rock is the hardened volcanic ash from the Valles Caldera eruptions - pretty cool to see. The valleys all around are littered with evidence of home sites!

That wraps up our busy and long weekend. Cheers!

Marc

Albuquerque International Hot Air Balloon Festival

Catherine purchased our hotel room a solid 9 months ago, maybe more. When we arrived at the hotel Friday evening, they had cancelled our reservation due to "issues" with the credit card. Miraculously, they still had a room just like the one we had reserved, but for more money. Instead of the three nights we had planned, we spent just the one in Albuquerque. Best Western just took the very last dollar we'll ever give them...

Anyways, we had a place to stay for the night, so we got up pretty early to brave the hordes. They estimated 100,000 people showed up for the first morning mass ascension, in which they launched 600-700 balloons (300-400 is typical). The traffic we endured getting in and out makes that sound about right.

They launched balloon after balloon for 2.5 hours - it was quite the spectacle.

Even the kids had a good time, though after the first hour, I think the fun-meter was pretty pegged.

After the show, we made our way back to Santa Fe for a nice lunch and exploring the historic downtown. We then drove the (very) scenic route to our hotel in Los Alamos. We saw quite a bit that we'd come back to for more exploring the following day. All in all, it was a very busy day.

Cheers,

Marc

Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Rail Road

This past weekend we loaded up the family for a long weekend road trip. First up, the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Rail Road out of Chama, NM. We drove up Thursday evening to Santa Fe so we could be a short 2'ish hours from the train station. 

The train had some mechanical difficulties, but we eventually were underway and climbing through some beautiful fall foliage.

We had lunch in Colorado at the halfway point, and then road the train back into New Mexico.

It was a long day on the train, but the scenery was stunning. 

Next up, Albuquerque's International Hot Air Balloon Festival - the 50th anniversary!

Cheers,

Marc

White Sands National Park Hot Air Balloon Ascension

Catherine and I got up pretty early today to go see the hot air balloon ascension at White Sands National Park.

We did not have the place to ourselves, that is for sure. The balloons were supposed to launch at 7 am, but it was probably closer to 7:30 before the first balloon launched.

They had quite a few balloons, but didn't quite manage a mass launch, it was onesies and twosies until they all had launched.

It was a lot of work for the ballooners, since they launched, floated maybe 300 yards (some barely skimming the hillside downwind!) and landed in or near another parking lot.

I think their total time in the air was less than 3 minutes, maybe 5 at the outside most.

We are set to see the big hot air balloon show in a couple of weeks in Albuquerque; it should be a pretty good show.

I am pretty sure there will be naps later - have a great day!

Marc

Jeff's visit

Jeff made a quick visit to and experience southern New Mexico. We crammed as much in there as we could. The morning after he arrived, I had to run with the installation on our 9-11 memorial run. Shortly after that, Jeff and I loaded up and went to Dripping Springs, to hike up to the former tuberculosis sanitarium. We haven't had a ton of rain lately, so the springs truly were just dripping.

From there, we made our way to White Sands National Park. It was hot, and it was bright. Even under a hat with sunglasses, the light was painfully intense, so we didn't stick around. We then went up to Cloudcroft to see the Mexican Canyon Trestle. We had lunch at a little BBQ place I hadn't been to yet - but totally will go back to. Mad Jacks is the more famous/busy of the two, but Son-In-Law had great food, too!

After lunch we drove to Bluff Springs, which is about 7-8 miles down a gravel road. We saw a cowboy recovering a run-away horse, and a few other people along the way, but not many.

We drove back to WSMR, since I had a farewell/social function I had to attend. The next morning, Ian, Jeff, and I got up pretty darn early to hit the road - we had a long day ahead of us. We drove to Silver City, where we ate at the slowest Denny's on the entire earth. That didn't ruin our plans at all, since we were probably the third group there, but it did set us back a bit.

After getting fed and watered, we headed north to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The road twists through the mountains, up and over the continental divide a time or two. We hiked up through a beautiful, and cool, canyon on the way to the cliff dwellings.

We had the dwellings to ourselves - only a park ranger was there with us. A couple of people arrived after, but we had the place basically to ourselves.

Ian showed Jeff the pictographs painted on the walls, which he had learned about on a previous trip.

We hiked back to the car, and checked out a smaller dwelling, and then Spirit Canyon with its many pictographs on the way home.

We took another wonderful, twisty mountain road home, with lunch at Sparky's.

Cheers,

Marc

Happy Labor Day

It was a busy weekend for the Skinners in New Mexico!

We went to Carlsbad Caverns on Friday to watch half a million bats fly out of the one entrance on their way to a meal. It was pretty neat - the bats circle in what amounts to a vortex as they gain altitude to escape the bowl that the cavern mouth sits in. They then fly in a "river" to wherever they go to eat. It was silent to us, but you could hear the air moving from all those wings.

Saturday we took in a bunch of football games with some friends. Sunday I loaded up the motorcycle and headed into the mountains - I was lucky to find a campsite, as most campgrounds were full.

I grabbed the last site, then did a bit of riding further up the mountain to see the sights. 

Monday morning I was up early, as usual, and headed out as soon as the tent was dry. While I was enjoying some coffee and waiting for breakfast to cook, I noticed a long string of lights in the sky - I think it was a Skylink train of satellites, which was pretty cool. I only had my cell phone - so no cool photos.

On my trip up into the mountains (again), I came across a young bear running on the road. Thankfully he was small and mom was nowhere to be found. There isn't much protection from animals on a motorcycle!

The mountains are putting on a last, spectacular, display of flowers for the summer. The whole mountainside (below) was turning yellow from the flowers. We've had a pretty wet summer, compared to the wildfires we had, I'll take it!

Cheers,

Marc