Shallow Thoughts : tags : New Mexico

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Wed, 01 Oct 2025

Flying Fluff and Spiderwebs

[Looking up at tall trees from the forest floor; one of the trees is blocking the sun so there's a flare around where the sun is] 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.

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[ 14:41 Oct 01, 2025    More hikes | permalink to this entry | ]

Fri, 08 Jul 2022

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

[North and Central American rivers in New Mexico] 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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[ 18:05 Jul 08, 2022    More mapping | permalink to this entry | ]

Tue, 29 Sep 2020

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.

[Bridge across the Rio Grande] 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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[ 12:50 Sep 29, 2020    More misc | permalink to this entry | ]