Shallow Thoughts : tags : New Mexico

Porcupines!

We had business in Albuquerque yesterday, and the weather was nice, so we brought our bikes along to explore the trails along the Rio Grande bosque.

It was a beautiful, relaxing ride. The trails were packed with happy, friendly cyclists, hikers, runners, plus people on scooters and a couple of those one-wheel, self balancing skateboards (which I'd never seen on a trail before). I think we saw more other trail users than in the cumulative past year hiking in our usual spots.

There were lots of cranes on the river and in the sky, and a roadrunner who ran across the trail in front of us, then slowly made its way up the branches of a tree before gliding across the canal then running up to the top. Dave and I never get tired of watching roadrunners — the most Velociraptor-like birds there are. I wish they were more common in White Rock.

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Flying Fluff and Spiderwebs

On a recent bike ride up at the East Fork trail, Dave had to go back to the car to get something he'd forgotten, leaving me guarding his pack.

It turned out that was a blessing in disguise. While I waited, looking up at the spectacular backlit sky high above the ponderosas, I saw hundreds of little fluff pieces floating by, highlighted and glowing from the sun behind them. Occasionally, I'd see long filaments drift past: I assume they were strands of spider web, perhaps with tiny baby spiders attached, invisible at that distance.

I tried to capture them on phone video, but unsurprisingly, the video wasn't good enough to capture them, and neither were the still photos.

Not Only Not a State, but Not in North America Either?

New Mexicans are used to people thinking we're not part of the US.

Every New Mexican has stories, like trying to mail-order something and being told "We don't ship outside the US".

I had a little spare time and decided I'd follow a tutorial that's been on my to-do list for a while: Creating Beautiful River Maps with Python. It combines river watercourse data from gaia.geosci.unc.edu with watershed boundaries from the HydroSheds project using Python and GeoPandas, making a map that is, as promised in the title, beautiful.

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Y is for Yunque

Dave was browsing through satellite imagery and noticed what looked like an old bridge across the Rio Grande just north of Española, near the Ohkay Owingeh pueblo.

In the Days of COVID, one cure for the stir-crazies is to get in the car and go for a drive. So we ventured forth to check out this bridge.

Sure enough, just west of where County Road 56A crosses the Rio, there's a little stub of a dead-end road called Yunque that leads to a footbridge.

The name Yunque sounded vaguely familiar, but neither of us could pin down why.

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