Year 3: A Walk in the Cerrillos Hills
Date: Monday, April 28, 2008
Weather in New Mexico: Warm Days, Cool Nights, and Lots of Wind
Location: Los Cerrillos, New Mexico
Today it was my turn to go to the clinic. My cold has just gotten worse and worse and has turned into a sinus infection. Now Mark and I are both on antibiotics. Hopefully we will be feeling better soon. And the other bad news is that George has not returned. Justin and Jo went through the village today knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen the cat, but the only news they returned with is that George was probably taken by an owl. Now George was a really big cat, but evidently the owls
around here are really big as well. I guess it is a good thing that we have been keeping the other cats in at night now. We sure don’t want to lose another one.
Jo hoed the garden today and Mark worked on fencing. There are lots of jack rabbits and nothing green is going to survive in the garden without good fencing. Justin and Jo also have four chickens and they are in the fenced area next to the garden where J and J would like to let the bunnies run free sometimes. So we need to make sure that neither the chickens nor the wild and tame rabbits can get into the garden. In the afternoon, we took a walk in Justin and Joe’s “backyard” in the Cerrillos
Hills. An arroyo or dry river bed runs behind Justin and Jo’s yard and on the other side the hills rise up all around. It is in these hills that the turquoise mines were located. There is very little mining these days and the whole area has been turned into a historic park with paths leading you past many of the old mines. We started out on a three-mile loop walk but Mark and I decided after reaching the first mine that we needed to turn back. The hills are gentle slopes, but with the high altitude
and bad colds, it was just too hard to breathe. We did get up high enough to look down on the town and enjoy the views. Lulu and Alfie, Justin and Jo’s two dogs, accompanied us on our walk and taught us all good lessons about staying away from cactus and sand burrs. The sand burrs here are called goat’s heads and they really hurt if you step on one. The poor dogs seem to get either a cactus thorn or sand burr in their paws every few feet. I was glad I had on hiking boots.
 |
| 080428 New Mexico–Ce |
