Framedlight

 We decided that today would be a bit of a road trip. The Rio Grande flows through Las Cruces and we thought we would follow it north on a minor road until we reached the town of Hatch, famous for its chiles. As we drove away from the house in Las Cruces we got a good view of the Organ Mountains. The sky showed us that the hot weather we had been experiencing might well be coming to an end. At points along the way we could see the river that was meandering slowly and shrunkenly. We were starting to see large fields of chillies growing at the side of the road. An old road, the Camino Real had followed the course of the Rio Grande until it left the side of the river to travel north east to Santa Fe on the Jornado del Muerto. A camp had been set up at this junction, near the present town of Radium Springs, centuries before at Paraje de Robledo, which in the mid 19th century helped defend the local white population against attacks by the Apache. In 1861 the Confederate Army established...

We left the lodge at 5.00 in the morning, driving out in to the dark past the Laguna Colorada, heading south towards Chile. Just before dawn we could make out the shape of steam billowing and mixing with the frosty air. We had reached the geothermic area of Sol de Manana or morning sun, very appropriate. We were up at 4580m so it was pretty nippy. We were given the customary twenty minutes to look around and I set up my tripod. The sky was reddening in the distance and I got some pictures of the general area and a geyser (although apparently not a geyser according to Wikipedia but a bore hole in the geothermal field). Mairi posed in front of the 'not a geyser' but Naomi came in a bit late and hadn't realised that I had asked Mairi to stand still for a long exposure. The sun was coming up fast as we drove off and headed for some more steam and hot springs past some beautiful mountains catching the warm early light. There was a lot of activit...