More photos from my New Mexico trip

On Saturday, February 27, Cardgrrl's sister had arranged for us to see a play in Santa Fe, about an hour north of Albuquerque. Her husband suggested that we stop to see "Tent Rocks" on the way. I had never heard of it, but I was feeling game for just about anything.

I'm glad we went. It's a spectacular place. You can read all about it at either the Bureau of Land Management's official site or Wikipedia. The place is chock-full of some of the most strangely shaped rocks, cliffs, and hills you'll ever see. They look as if they were deliberately sculpted by an artist, but it's just combinations of natural forces at work.

As has become my usual practice, I've dumped all my photos onto Picasa Web here. It was heavily overcast the day we were there, so even after digitally tweaking up the brightness and contrast in most of the photos, they don't do justice to the range of colors you'd see on a bright day. Also, can you spot Cardgrrl sneaking into one of the shots?

I don't have any difficulty picking my favorite photo out of this batch. It's this one:



Then again, I have a peculiar fondness for the gnarly shapes of dead trees.

Although much less overwhelming than the rocks and mountains, I was quite taken by the complex masses of exposed tree roots seen frequently throughout the park:








A few other nice pics:













The only thing in Santa Fe that I took pictures of was a monument erected in 1868 in the middle of town, and I only thought that was interesting because of how it had been defaced:




We speculated that the word most likely to have been scratched out by an unhappy citizen was "savage." That seemed to get confirmed when we looked at the other side of the monument, to find this plaque (apparently put there before the defacing was done):




We left on Monday, March 1. I returned to Vegas and Cardgrrl to D.C. In front of the airport's car rental facility she spotted a bit of sculpture she liked and asked me to take a picture of her with it. I have titled the resulting composition "Cougar and lions." It's one of my finest artistic works to date:





The plane passed right over Hoover Dam and the new bypass highway being constructed near it, giving me the chance for the last photo of this trip:



One more installment of the trip report yet to come: An afternoon at Sandia Casino. Stay tuned.