Framedlight

I had booked a small house in the hamlet of Barranca near Abiquiu to stay for a few nights. It is about 40 miles north of Bandelier so in the late afternoon we set off. But first, we had found out that there was a good view to be had of the Rio Grande gorge in a place called White City, which was nearly en route. The look out point was hard to find and involved tracing our way through some dull suburbs, but we were rewarded by the vista. The Rio Grande looked brown and sluggish and we could see snow on the furthest mountains. We made one more stop by the side of the highway as the light was so pretty. By the time we got to Abiquiu it was pitch black and we struggled to find the house, even with the help of a sat nav.  

  After we had consumed our coffee in Mesilla we went to nearby Bosque del Mesilla State Park. We met some really friendly rangers there but saw very few birds. As always they were hiding. The reserve lies alongside the banks of the Rio Grande. The autumn is the driest season in New Mexico and there was very little water flowing along the river. There had been some fires in the reserve and the blackened branches made a good contrast against the light green foliage. We did see a number of house finches in a tree. After our little walk we had a picnic lunch and then set out for the main event of the day, driving north west to the City of Rocks. The weather was looking very stormy again, especially as we drove past the Cooke Range Mountains.

 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 a p