Another exquisite morning in Taos, and my goal is Durango! I’m not actually supposing that I’m going to get to Durango, but Pagosa Springs would be close enough for the day! Out of Taos by the way I had come, but now with fresh batteries in the camera. First stop is the Rio Grande canyon to get the photos that had been missed on the way in. The vendors are beginning to set up in the parking lots on the eastern side of the bridge, and the canyon is dark with the morning shadows.
A walk out onto the bridge! I’m reminded, writing here, of my 1970 trip to Europe. One of the stops there was a campground in France, on the Gard River, at the Pont du Gard. The Pont du Gard is the remains of a circa 19 BC Roman aqueduct, originally constructed as a part of the water supply system for Nimes, France. It is reputed to be the highest of the Roman aqueducts (160 feet), and one of best preserved. Camping came with the opportunity to swim in the river, at the feet of the ancient structure. The swimming was delightful! I don’t recall the entire range of opportunities, but I vividly recall standing in mid-calf deep water, and watching sizeable fish hover in the eddies a foot downstream of my legs.
People have been crossing the aqueduct for centuries, in fact it owes its preservation to its use as a toll crossing in medieval times. Seeing others on the top, I decided to see what the top was about. Access to both the conduit and to the top was an easy climb in lightly wooded terrain. The top is wide enough to drive a car across, and appears strong enough to do so.
However, walking across, along the center of this causeway that one couldn’t possibly fall off of, peripheral vision announced to me in no uncertain terms that I was walking at least at 60 MPH, and I was completely out of control of my movements. Uncanny. Not vertigo - the sensation stopped as soon as I stopped - but instead a breakdown in my visual feedback system. A sense of being unable to keep control of my balance and position while walking. I suppose I could have shut my eyes and the sensation would have gone away, but that seemed like a pretty bad idea! By focusing on the pavement, and maintaining that concentration, I was able to walk, but it was extraordinarily difficult. Makes me wonder what a child, just learning to walk, experiences!
The same experience did not occur on the Rt. 64 bridge, apparently because the guardrails - which were non-existent on the Pont du Gard - were in peripheral vision, and thus my brain was receiving familiar visual cues.
Pont du Gard, looking downstream.
Pont du Gard again, looking more or less upstream. Swimming was at the foot in the foreground, hidden by the trees on the slope. Got up to the top at the end at the far left of this photo. Some steps had been cut into the top of the second tier and the bottom of third tier, that one could ascend to the top of the third tier.By the time I finished taking photographs, a good number of vendors had set their wares out. Right at the end of the bridge, there was an older woman with tables of jewelry out. Browsing briefly, I immediately found some lapis earrings and a lapis stone, pierced as for a pendant. I knew that lapis would look stunning with my daughter’s hair (and I’m still hoping that she’ll pierce her ears that I can buy her many more earrings), and, knowing that a dear friend of mine is enamored of cobalt glass, I thought she’d enjoy lapis also, and would be able to work the lapis stone into a necklace for herself.
It was the vendor’s birthday, and we talked of her residence in the region. For years she had to haul water, but recently a communal well was drilled (she said the well had to go to the depth of the river), and water became plentiful! Wishing her a happy day, I walked on to see what else might be around.
Nearby there was a young man with a table full of turquoise and malachite cabochons at extremely low prices. It turned out that most of the pieces were flawed in some way, which gave reason for the attractive prices. However, I rather like some types of flaws in stones - as in wood and people, it is the flaws which give the character (I better think so because I’ve got lots n’ lots of flaws). One particular piece of turquoise, which looked like Sleeping Beauty, caught my attention, and it will be worked into the headstock of the OM sized guitar I’m finishing up now. Marked at $3, but he reduced it to $2, without asking, because of the flaw. To me, the flaw looks like a star in an azure sky, perhaps Venus at dawn.
Across the highway, to a leather worker. Extraordinarily energetic individual, years ago I would have said “speed freak”, but we got into a long discussion the drug trade in NM, during which he vociferously denied using any drugs. He explained that the (more or less) center of drug trafficking in northern NM was Espanola (remember I wrote that I didn’t like the energy in Espanola?). His leather work didn’t appeal to me, but he had a photograph of the bridge and canyon, that a friend of his had taken, for sale as both a postcard (dramatic color) and a panoramic print (dramatic format). I bought both.
Back into the car, thinking the next stop would be Pagosa Springs, but that was not to be. Just a few miles along, I passed the unusual, glittering, seeming free-form buildings that I had noticed on the way in to Taos. Earthships! There is an information center and model building, and an invitation to see what they’re about. Well, they are indeed impressive, and quite self-sustaining. I’ll leave it to your interest to search them on Google, here are some passing comments.
The primary construction modules are used automotive and small truck tires. The tires are stacked in courses like bricks, and then filled with rammed earth. The technique allows for curved walls, domes, etc. Where stuccoed with adobe or cement, the walls are fairly uniform. Where not covered, they are (to my eye) ugly, and smell of tires. I can’t help but think that while a more or less beneficial use of otherwise hard to recycle waste, it can’t ultimately be healthy to breathe the outgasses over years.
Elsewhere, and in addition to tires, walls are constructed with glass bottles and jars, wine bottles seeming to be predominant. I asked, and was told that bottles are readily available from willing donors. In that system, the bottles are laid on their sides, sometimes with the necks cut off, in adobe, and adobe plastered over. Where bottles are used with their necks cut off, the cut ends facing each other and to the center of the wall, a light transmitting wall can be constructed - yielding the glittering walls I had seen from the road.
Flat roofs are covered with rubber membranes, and collect water in 10,000 gallon cisterns.. They use conventional toilets, plumbed to a more or less conventional septic system, but instead of a subterranean leach field they use effluent gardens. Those gardens are not used for edible crops. I asked about composting toilets, and was told that they had been tried but had not worked out very well.
Graywater is filtered and used to irrigate interior gardens, used for ornamentals and kitchen garden type crops. As a result, the building interiors are rather more humid than the arid exteriors, and quite pleasant.
Building costs are high.
Leaving the Earthships, 64 runs westerly towards 84. North on 84 is towards Colorado and Pagosa Springs. South on 84 is towards Ghost Ranch. Now, it being Saturday, I’m expecting to eventually encounter traffic. But no, the very few cars I encounter ascending this southern spur of the San Juan mountains are inoffensive, and there is ample time to pay attention to the beauty. I decide that I’ll head south towards Ghost Ranch when I reach the option point.
On ascent, which starts immediately after leaving Tres Piedras, the terrain changes from the mostly flat sagebrush plain to rolling, but continuously ascending hills, rather like the foothills of the Poconos here in the east. The slopes are steeper though, and the vegetation is different. Where the Poconos are mixed hardwoods and some fully shaped conifers, Carson has mostly aspen and many precisely spired spruces. It being October, the aspens are gold against the spruces, exquisite! There’s an occasional lush farm, quite remote - and quite beautiful! I’m supposing winters are difficult.
This supposition is reinforced on the westerly side of the range spine. There, multiple switchbacks yield grand vistas, and the land seems harsher, like its been exposed to many millennia of cold, wet winds. There are many places where the road has apparently been washed out, and the washes filled with asphalt. I think that I don’t want to be on that road in the kind of weather that causes such powerful streams to flow over the roadway so as to excavate it and carry it in the chasms adjacent.
On reaching 84, I turn left towards Ghost Ranch. Why Ghost Ranch? Well, I want to see what Georgia O’Keefe saw. For the most part, we don’t get to see the environments in which artists have lived. Monet’s Giverny has been preserved that we can see what he saw, and we are free to see the places Ansel Adams photographed, but we can never see what Edward Hopper saw, and the Hudson Valley has been developed even beyond what the Hudson River School artists feared. Oh, yes, I’m sure you can come up with examples I’ve missed, but regardless of what you show, you will never be able to say that it is usual to be able to see what an artist of the past saw. Thus, to me, in October, 2010, I have a rare opportunity!
On the way south, there’s a small sign, a turnoff to Echo Amphitheater. I can’t resist, even though the name is itself an echo of all those roadside attractions billboarded into notoriety elsewhere. It’s a Bureau of Land Reclamation site, and there’s a trivial user fee, payable in cash or check only. The parking lot is at the head of a canyon, and a paved path leads into the canyon. There a signs warning to stay on the path as the terrain is sensitive, and there are a few pleasant, paved picnic sites just off the main path.
The walls of the canyon rise on both sides of the path. The distance between the walls is but one or two hundred yards. To the right is an eroded promontory revealing epochs of aggregation of the seabed. The lower strata are mostly pale red iron, then there comes a slightly darker region still iron red, then a chalk white region, topped with ochre and then earth brown. I wonder how far back into time I am walking.
The promentory at the easterly end of the northern wall of the canyon. That grey layer at the very top is what we would call topsoil. Its perhaps 20 - 30 inches thick in this photo.
The northern wall, or at least the top of it!At the back of the canyon, there is indeed a natural amphitheater. The lower strata have eroded, and there is an enormous conchoidal fracture in the upper strata, such that a dome has formed. This is my first experience with such rock formations, and it opens my eyes to the possibility. There is even an oculus, though which running water has left a stain on the underside of the half dome. Of course, the echo must be tried!
The amphitheater itself. The above photos are to the right of this spot, and behind. There is a rocky ascent near the bottom of the amphitheater, that one can better get to the focus of the semi-dome.Returning to my car, I see the first of many more shallow, conchoidal caves that have formed in the cliffs easterly of Echo Amphitheater. Days later, at Mesa Verde, I realize that most of the abodes there exist beneath such convenient fractures. The earths grow increasingly more colorful! Still, as beautiful as the colors of the earth at the Amphitheater are, they have not prepared me for arrival in the region of Ghost Ranch. To the west, in this arid land, is a lake! Apparently Rio Chama, which runs southeasterly from the Chama River Canyon Wilderness area, was dammed, creating a body of water called Abiquiu Lake/Reservoir.
To the east is Ghost Ranch, which extends in a semi-circle perhaps 2 miles away from the road, and to the foot of a large mesa. At the northerly and southerly ends of the ranch area, the mesa comes right up to the road. Its not startlingly high, but it is startlingly colored. While truth is that it is a limited palette, it seems that all the colors of an artist’s palette are there. No wonder Ms. O’Keefe chose to live there, she had chosen to live with her pigments! On closer examination, it is really only the iron reds that are present, tempered by occasional chalky, white strata, and occasional reduced iron greys. But, the impression is of a riot of color!
A lake! I can smell it!
There's no way a photo can do the colors justice.I’m hot; I’m thirsty - the lake has tantalized me. And, while I was able to refill my water bottle at Echo Amphitheater, the water was so soft as to be flat and alkaline tasting and I’m wondering what it might do to my digestion; and I’m hungry - all I’ve had to eat is raisins and crystallized ginger from Albuquerque. A stop for gas finds a large convenience store, where I’m able to get water, but nothing that seems healthy to eat. So, back on the road, and more raisins on the way north to Pagosa (anybody remember Johnny Horton’s “North to Alaska”?) I wonder what he ate?
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