Acoma

On Sunday we joined our friends Tom and Leah in Albuquerque to go to the Acoma Pueblo, an hour west of Albuquerque. This pueblo is called "sky city" because of its original location on a high mesa. The mesa has been inhabited since 1150 AD, apparently making it the oldest continuously inhabited village in the United States. The Spanish arrived in the early to mid 1600s and began building a mission (with Indian slave labor) in 1629. The Spanish were kicked out during the New Mexico wide pueblo revolt in 1680 but the mission survived because it had been built over the villages' original plaza and the Indians continued to use it for their ceremonial gatherings. Several families who were more loyal Catholics saved the patron saint statue (St. Stephen) and some an oil painting. The two Franciscan priests at the mission at the time were stoned to death. The Spanish returned in 1692 but promised they would not persecute the Indians for practicing their own customs if they also practiced Catholicism. They also allowed the Pueblos to govern themselves and gave them control over their own lands (how generous!).

The mission remains a sacred place today as is the cemetery outside the church. Because the village sits on rock, the cemetery was constructed with earth hauled up bucket by bucket by the women. The men built a wall surrounding it to contain the soil. They are on the last possible layer now with many layers of bodies over the centuries. No photography was allowed in the cemetery or mission.

Except for a couple festival days, you can only visit Sky City with a guided tour. From the visitor's center you take a bus up to the top and walk around the town. The guide was quite good despite being nearly hoarse. She had a very dry sense of humor, for example noting that only men could go into the kivas, but she was sure they had a big screen tv and some lounge chairs in there. Although the Acoma have a matriarchal society, men govern the town. They now seem to have a quite a tourism business going. You pay for the tour and there is a separate fee if you want to take photographs. Up on the mesa different people are selling pottery and food and drinks. You get to look at the pottery briefly during the tour and if you want to go back to a certain section afterwards to purchase something they have a someone guide you back.

From a practical standpoint, there are only 7 - 13 families living on the mesa. There is no electricity except from generators. All food and water come from below except for an intermittently filled reservoir. There is no running water and just outhouses (or now port a potties) for restrooms. Most families live in a modern village about ten miles away, but they do own houses on the mesa that they come to for festivals.

Jake and I chose to walk back down to the visitor's center along the rock stairway (see last photo). This stairway was very steep, but had handholds cut into the rocks at convenient intervals.

Ortiz Mountains

On Saturday we drove down to the Ortiz Mountains about a half hour south of Santa Fe. We were visiting a preserve owned by the County but operated by the Santa Fe Botanic Garden. It was given to the botanic garden by a gold mining company. There has been gold mining in the mountains since the mid 1800s. In one photo you can see an old mine carved into the ground. In that era, the rocks with gold were ground by horses turning a simple rock mill. The mill had a flat circular iron pan on the bottom filled with ordinary flat rocks and rocks hung from a bar overhead. The gold dust would filter down between the rocks on the bottom. There was lots of old mining trash around - tin cans, broken glass and ceramic bits. They worked the mine in the winter when snow could provide the water needed in mining. In another photo you can see a restored modern mine with a tailing pond on the left side. The whole middle section of a mountain is missing in the center of the photo and there is a 600 foot deep pit there that you can't see. It is slowly filling with water. The area around the mine has been planted with grasses and trees. The restoration was only acheived after a lawsuit overturned an 1872 state law that exempted mining companies from having to do any cleanup after mining. On the other side of the mountain the same mining company has finally secured both the mineral and water rights to a mine that will probably open soon. They originally had the mineral rights, but when the mine filled with water, they didn't have the water rights to allow them to pump it out!

To get to the Botanic Garden's property we got in the docent's 4 wheel drive vehicles and climbed about 2 miles up a very steep and rocky road. Docent training involves mostly safety and emergency training as opposed to history and botany! But there were some good botanists among the docents and we saw quite a few interesting plants. Attached are photos of a pink verbena and a native Mahonia (in the barberry family).

Curves

This morning after riding back from aerobics class I opened the garage door and something in the garage slithered. Good thing Jake was off running errands or he'd never set foot in the garage again! A baby snake lay in the middle of the floor. It slithered under some 2 x 4s and when I shifted those under a hose it went. The snake had a very dark head and a patterned body - black and tan. It was so small it was difficult to make out much more except for a bright orange-red tongue. Since I don't know anything about snakes of New Mexico, I'm calling it a baby rattlesnake (I did look online and there seem to be 72 species of snakes in New Mexico, less than half of which are rattlesnakes). For those of you who work at the Arboretum, you know visitors automatically assume all snakes are some poisonous variety! I moved the hose and all 5 inches of snake lunged at me, but I managed to drop a pyrex bowl over it and slide the JC Penny's ad under it (see photo). I released it over on the other side of the road by the arroyo.

Last night we had a gentle rain and an almost complete rainbow arched over the hills. Guess that house at one end must be where the pot of gold is! There was actually a faint double rainbow but the camera didn't pick it up.

Native Plant Walk

On Saturday we joined the Santa Fe Chapter of the New Mexico Native Plant Society on a walk in the Pecos Wilderness area east of Santa Fe. We all met at the parking lot of a local college and carpooled for the 40 minute drive. In our car we had another couple who had just moved to Santa Fe from Milwaukee, WI. She was a retired physicist and he had taught dentistry and done research on amphibian teeth. I don't think I knew frogs had teeth! Also a personal injury lawyer who had lived in the area for a long time. The whole group for the walk numbered about 15 people.

We parked at the Holy Ghost trail head and slowly made our way along the trail identifying plants. Most of the participants were not professionals, just people with a love of plants. Three dogs went on the walk, all pretty well behaved. The leader provided two plant lists from previous walks that were helpful. I could identify many plants to family or genus and then look on the list to see what the species was likely to be.

Attached is a photo of wood lily, Lilium philadelphicum, and of assorted people and the dog, Charlie, on the hillside harboring the wood lilies. Also a photo of Mertensia franciscana, Franciscan bluebells and of orange sneezeweed. The scenery was quite striking with small meadows, ravines, and many aspens and evergreen trees. Since we were walking pretty slowly I didn't notice any effect of the additional altitude.

On the way back, Jake drove through a tremendous thunderstorm that included hail briefly. Streams of water rushed along the edges of the highway. This was after taking a detour to get on the interstate after a semi truck failed to turn sharply enough and got stuck right before the interstate on-ramp on the soft shoulder.

Pecos Dreamin'

Sylvan will undoubtedly report on a delightful trip to the Pecos Wilderness with the New Mexico Native Plant Society. I went along fully aware of the possibility, nay, the probability that these charming yet botanically obsessed individuals would hike at the rate of two hours per mile and stop to appreciate every plant – even, I think, some without flowers (if you can believe it!). It all came true, but I was prepared. I threw a sleeping pad into the car and brought a mystery novel, but didn’t actually resort to either of them. My strategy from step one was to hike on ahead of the crowd, find a beautiful place to rest, and pull my sombrero down over my eyes for the half an hour or so it took for them to catch up. The result was a perfectly dreamy day in a beautiful woods. Accompanying this post are photos of several of my resting places – one beside a stream, the other in an aspen grove. Keep in mind that in Santa Fe we live in the high desert. The Pecos Wilderness area is just the other side of the mountain behind our house. There are trees and everything, just like a real forest – oh yeah, and some other plants.

Storm

Yesterday afternoon as I was posting to the blog there was a tremendous rainstorm that ended up dumping 3 inches of rain in our neighborhood! Other parts of town got no rain. But we got to see the arroyo in action at last! Jake ventured out in his Australian duster early on and reported that there was a small channel of water in the arroyo. Ten minutes later he said the water was all the way across the arroyo, and five minutes after that when I went out the water was rushing down in huge muddy waves! I suited up in my rain gear and sandals and we walked over to the bridge to marvel at it. Water was pouring in from all sides and the road in front of the house was awash in mud since it turns out there's a blocked culvert up the road.

The backyard was also completely flooded and we watched as muddy water poured over the stone retaining wall in a few places. So much for the nice mulch job that had been done this spring. It was enlightening though in terms of planning future landscaping.

After it finally stopped raining the water in the backyard disappeared within an hour and there's a photo of the arroyo an hour later with just ribbons of water running through it.

This morning we were going to walk up the arroyo, but the mud hasn't dried out yet. We rode our bikes up the road along the arroyo to the next bridge up though. That bridge has very small culverts and they were completely blocked by debris (see photo). Water and mud washed over that bridge probably making it impassable for a while last night.

Art and Folk Art

This weekend was the International Folk Art Festival in Santa Fe with more than 10,000 people attending. Jake and I took the shuttle bus up to Museum Hill where it was held on Saturday and after braving the throngs around the booths for an hour we escaped into the relative quiet of the Folk Art Museum. There who should we run into but Erica and her friend Roberto from Brazil! We knew Erica would be there, but it was still a thrill to just run into them. We left the festivities around noon and Erica and Roberto joined us at our house in the afternoon after an exhausting day of browsing. I don't think either of us bought anything, but there was some wonderful art there. Uzbekistan was particularly well represented for some reason with everything from pottery to lace to very fine oriental rugs.

On Friday night we joined other tourists on a rainy walk up Canyon Road to go the gallery openings. There are dozens of galleries along this road many in old adobe homes with nice outdoor sculpture gardens. The galleries with new exhibits put out wine or punch and sometimes food and it is quite enjoyable to stroll up the road with occasional stops to snack and drink. One favorite gallery was a ceramics gallery that had wonderful wood fired pieces with tree limbs against white or variably colored pale brown and blue backgrounds. Another exhibition we both liked featured off beat still lifes by artist Jacob Pfeiffer, see http://www.johnpence.com/visuals/painters/pfeiffer/pairs.htm for an example. And there were of course many beautiful paintings of southwestern landscapes.

Having gotten more to drink than to eat though after a couple hours of strolling, we stopped at La Fonda's restaurant afterwards for more food. La Fonda is a hotel that has a beautiful covered courtyard for the restaurant. The food is quite good and reasonable. I had the vegetarian plate which had a delicious red pepper polenta square, a roasted green chili stuffed with chick peas and chanterelles and miscellaneous other vegetables. Jake had his favorite green chili covered enchiladas. I also couldn't resist a glass of a New Mexico wine made by Gruet vineyards. It was an excellent chardonnay, not at all oakey and a little fruity. The vineyard also makes a very good sparkling wine. Gruet is a well-known winery in the Champagne region of France, so I guess they know what they're doing!

Varmint!

Just after moving in I planted some ceramic planters with a mix of petunias, salvia and coreopsis. Well, a few days later all the coreopsis and petunia flowers had been eaten off! I hadn't seen many creatures besides birds, so I at first attributed it to some flower eating bird. But then the petunia stalks began to disappear. I have never heard of any animal eating petunias! Who would eat a sticky, hairy stem like that?

The next victim was my one tomato plant. One healthy large stem was eaten to the ground, and the other stem had all the leaves eaten off. The basil around it was untouched, so I thought maybe whatever it was didn't like things in the mint family. Then, the basil leaves started to disappear! So we now have a basil, tomato and petunia eating critter. The only thing it hadn't touched was the salvia. Finally, Jake and I caught the mystery critter in action. It was what I had been thinking was a grey squirrel with a bad dye job. Turns out is a rock squirrel, well known occasional produce pest. See http://www.desertusa.com/animals/rock_squirrel.html for a photo and more information on the infamous rock squirrel.

I gave up on the tomato, but I put a hardware cloth cage around the remaining basil plants and sticks in the ceramic planters that seem to be deterring the rock squirrel. Or maybe it is just waiting for the coreopsis and petunias to flower again! One good thing about the rock squirrel is that it has made no attempt to climb onto the bird feeder but is content with the spilled seeds.

Projects

Jake dreams of making fine furniture and I wanted a cool looking outdoor table, so we teamed up on our first furniture making project to make a table for the porch with a tiled top! The tiles are talavera tiles from Mexico. This is not a fine piece of furniture, but we do think it turned out pretty well for an outdoor table. In fact we were so inspired that we went back to the tile store to pick out tiles for 2 side tables that we will make out of the leftover piece of plywood.

Also at the tile store were ceramic knobs decorated with all sorts of designs. We bought a bunch of those to put on the drawers in the kitchen. The kitchen cabinets and drawers had no knobs. It was a nice sleek look, but the cabinets aren't all that new and it is much easier to pull the drawers out now that they have knobs! One set of drawers has a flower theme, another vegetables, and a third butterflies, birds and fish.

Morning Walk at Hyde State Park

This morning we drove about ten miles up the road into the mountains to Hyde State Park for a walk. There is a real forest up there at the slightly higher elevation. Lots of Ponderosa pine and aspen and short shrubby oaks and rocky mountain maple. There is a nice path system and our 4 mile path looped down and around the hills. There were lots of familiar wildflowers, although probably different species than back east - false solomon's seal, sundrops, wild clematis, scarlet penstemon, pussytoes. And some new flowers like the bright red scarlet gilia, also called skyrockets!

The Birds

The baby robins have fledged and left without so much as a goodbye cheep. One day there were two, the next day one, and once we got out of bed yesterday morning the nest was empty. I've seen mom and dad searching the yard for insects still, but I haven't seen the fledglings again. I guess we can now take the nest down and clean off the porch. There are a lot of what look like small cherry pits lying around.

Other yard birds include hummingbirds, towhees, goldfinches, chickadees and house finches.

Arroyo

Last week in the cool of the evening we went for a walk up the arroyo, the dry creek bed, across the street from the house. There are houses along much of the way, but down in the creekbed it feels a little wild. Where the few streets pass over you have to either walk through culverts or scramble up the bank and back down. Although we have not seen any water in our section of the arroyo, it was clear that sometimes there is a great deal of water upstream at least. There are some fairly major erosion control structures along the way and the culverts are large.

More Updates on Life in Santa Fe

Now that the house and weather are accounted for, a few of the highlights since arriving here. On Friday night we celebrated our first week by going out for a nice dinner in town to the Anasazi Inn. It features noveau southwestern food, and was indeed quite good. Jake’s appetizer was a “cannelloni” with the shell made of thin strips of avocado wrapped around local goat cheese in a sauce of gazpacho. My main course was halibut over maitake mushrooms and fava beans and Jake’s featured lamb and – morels again! Shades of Europe.

On Saturday, we went for the really traditional Santa Fe food and entertainment. In the morning we went to the Farmer’s market and got lots of great local produce. As a supplement to breakfast we tried a foccaccia bread filled with apples and rhubarb. Next time I’m getting the breakfast burrito though filled with egg, fried potatoes and green chilies. Then we went down to the plaza later in the morning and caught the Gay Pride parade while eating a “Frito Pie”. This is a bag of fritos cut open with chili ladeled into it topped with cheese and optional jalapenos. Delicious! They sell these at the Five and Dime on the plaza and sometimes from a cart.

In the evening we went to the Santa Fe Rodeo. This was my first rodeo, and it was a blast. Events included bull riding and bareback bronco riding, calf roping, team calf roping, barrel racing and mutton busting. The rodeo starts with mutton busting. This is little kids, like 3- 6 years old I’m guessing based on size, that attempt to cling to a sheep. They all wore helmets and had huge grins after falling off, and the sheep seemed pretty patient with it all.

The bull riding was pretty frightening with the first rider falling off quickly and the bull seeming to be determined to gore him, but all was fine in the end. Very few cowboys managed to stay on the allotted 6 seconds and these were all professionals, many of whom are in the top 15 in the world apparently.

The bronco riding was different than I expected with the riders leaning back almost parallel to the horse and their legs having to stay in front of the cinch to get points. Most of them were also thrown off before 6 seconds were up.

The skill required for calf roping and barrel riding were most impressive, but the calf roping was generally unsuccessful. Guess the calves were running faster than usual that night. For the barrel riding, the women had to race around 3 barrels and back across the finish line in close to 17 seconds to win.

The rodeo offered featured lots of other entertainment. A local singer gave a decent rendition of the country western song about what she would do to her boyfriend’s pickup truck if he ever cheated on her but did not do so well leading the National Anthem. A group of women riders representing the Cheyenne Frontier Days did an amazing display of horsemanship with fancy patterns like the equivalent of a marching band on horseback at 35 mph. And a family with two boys ages maybe 8 and 16 performed. The 8 year old did trick riding including double vaults over his running pony, the 16 year old is the world’s best trick roper, both on the ground and on horseback performing really amazing roping displays, and the dad shot balloons with a 45 while running by on horseback.

On the homefront, the robin family has 3 babies keeping them very active!

Santa Fe Weather

A huge rain and hail storm has just passed by with probably more rain than Santa Fe has seen in several months. Rainfall here though is extremely localized. We could have gotten rain here and a mile down the road will be perfectly dry. In flatter areas and from the hilltops you can see rain showers traveling.

Generally clouds have been building up in the afternoon and then evaporate again by nightfall. In June, Santa Fe had 0.04 inches of rain, so just because there are clouds does not mean that there is rain! Then there is the phenomenon of virgas – rain that falls but evaporates before reaching the ground. Despite clouds, I don’t think the humidity has ever reached above 50% and most of the time it is less than 30%.

The sun shines very brightly, but if you are in the shade it feels cool. Temperatures have been in the low 90s during the day and mid 50s at night. In the sun, it feels hot, but sweat evaporates. Because of this, you have to be very careful to drink a lot of water. I always feel like July and August are truly the hottest months of summer, so we’ll see if this great high altitude weather lasts!

Santa Fe Aesthetic

We live in a territorial style house. The outside walls are covered in pinkish-brown stucco the color of the rocks on the surrounding hills. The roof lies flat, hidden behind walls that rise slightly above the roof line. There are no gutters, only channels that drain what little rainwater falls into rain barrels or the rocky ground. Inside the walls are supported by massive raw logs of pine with decorative cornices at each end. The floors are covered in Saltillo tiles, reddish brown glazed tiles with thick stripes of reddish brown grout between them. Many of the rooms have skylights that brighten the interior in addition to windows, and the living room and study have French doors that lead outside to patios. We generally throw open all the doors to the cool morning air and close them late morning to conserve the coolness if it’s a warm day.

The décor is very different from an eastern house as well. Tiles with southwestern motifs are set into the walls in some places, and the doors are painted a bright turquoise green. Little arched niches in the walls now hold Jake’s kachina collection and some pottery. The living room has a rounded kiva fireplace with a strip of turquoise tiles along the mantel.

Outside fences called coyote fences provide privacy from the neighbors. The coyote fences are just 2-3” logs still with bark on them wired together. The first plant you notice arriving at the house is the grey-blue leaved chemisa, a native shrub that bears yellow flowers. Chemisa lines the roadsides around here, and it is a lovely plant for landscaping. Our house has quite a few trees planted. Aspens with their white bark contrast nicely with some dark green spruce trees and with the stucco color of the house. Another small tree with silvery colored foliage common around the house is unfortunately the invasive Russian olive. There are also many sprouts of Siberian elm that I will have to try to dig out.

The backyard is irrigated and, a taste of home, a wisteria vine winds its way up a corner of the porch and along the porch roof. Even here wisteria needs severe pruning and a pile of cut vines now resides between a shed and the coyote fence waiting to be bundled for trash pickup. A spiny Pyracantha covers another wall. The beds along the house and stone retaining wall contain a few flowers - daylilies, beardtongue, bearded iris, Russian sage and some hollyhocks. A coyote fence by the hottub is covered in a huge silver lace vine that I have not gotten a chance to cut back yet and it is growing into a neighboring pine tree.

To the north of the house a tall hill rises and includes a little more backyard, but with no irrigation. Up there are cedar and pine trees and two kinds of cacti, a type of prickly pear and a cholla cactus. The cholla have beautiful purple flowers at the ends of their stubby branches during part of the year.

Within the historic district of Santa Fe, which ends just a few blocks from our road, all the houses and buildings have to be stucco, and it does lend a charming appearance to the town. Apparently downtown Santa Fe used to have quite a few regular “American” or old west looking buildings but some government officials decided it would be better for tourism to go with stucco.

Last night we visited a brand new house built on the hills overlooking town. The couple that owns it designed it. The kitchen featured a large island covered in dark blue tiles with side countertops sheathed in copper. The ceilings were paneled in different woods in every room – cedar planks in one and maybe birch or small cherry with the bark still on in another. The outdoor area was divided into three “rooms” all with beautiful views over the mountains and town. But overall the style was still territorial with adobe colored walls, a flat roof and wood beams.