Omg I’m so behind on my blogs. I have like four things to write about so I really need to hammer these out!! Hahah
So a couple weeks ago my sister and I took our kids down to my folks place in New Mexico. My parents live about 50 minutes south of Santa Fe, and 40 minutes east of Albuquerque. They live in beautiful countryside at the base of South Mountain. I actually really love visiting there. It’s relaxing and calm. They always have a breeze or wind. The air is fresh. My mom has beautiful flower and vegetable gardens. And the night sky is like none other. Lacking light pollution and sitting at a slightly higher elevation (about 7k ft), the stars are bright and beautiful.
The kids love going down there because they can run around all over my parents five acres, shooting arrows, building forts, climbing on the new tractor, and gathering eggs from and feeding the chickens.
It’s just a different life when we’re down there.
So my sister and I took off one day on adventure climb up South Mountain. Much of the mountain is actually unoccupied land. We took off up the road to a vacant land plot and traversed north up the ridge to get up on the low side of the ridge we would need to hike up to the west.
Once we got up a little ways we quickly realized that we had likely overshot our ridge. The shrub growth was thick and it was hard to see up the hill. But we got deterred by the next ridge and ended up doing significant back tracking, thrashing our way though the often dense brush. Just weaving as best we could! Consulting the topo map and identifying landmarks as best we could.
As we picked our way up the mountain, the terrain got rockier and less forgiving. The cactus were abundant. And the rocks in places were impassable just because of sheer size and the bushes and cactus surrounding them.
We didn’t actually quite make the summit. We’d been out at this point I think for 2.5 hours already and we got to a fence that was most definitely old, but we were not certain we should continue. So considering both factors we continued the slow trek back down. Which was just as difficult as when we were going up!! We descended down the south side of the mountain which had an enormous and loose boulder field. So we took it extremely slow. And once we were through that, the cactus were even more plentiful!! We saw the abandoned cabin at the end of the neighborhood where my parents live. So we targeted that and just weaved our way down.
So it was a super fun adventure. We were definitely tired after!! It wasn’t a ton of mileage, but the work we had to do to get each foot…. lol. It made for a really fun afternoon. 🤩
