Northern New Mexico – Questa and Taos – 5/1 to 5/23/2019

Karen and I started our first month-long stay at an RV park this month.  If you read my last blog post, you might remember that the rate for staying in an RV park for a month can be significantly discounted compared to the normal daily or weekly rate, so there is some incentive to choose to stay for a month.  Of course, we wouldn’t just do so anywhere…it has to be a place that will provide us access to interesting places to visit and explore.  We picked Questa NM because of its proximity to the mountains, the Rio Grande Gorge, Carson National Forest, and, probably most compelling, the town of Taos.  Taos has a significant Native American population and it’s a long-time artist colony, so there are many galleries/museums showcasing regional artistry.  In addition, there is quite a bit of adobe-style architecture, some of it historic, but much of it contemporary, too.  I will post some photos of this in this blog entry.

While the last RV park we were in in Angel Fire was a very new and luxurious RV “resort”, the one that we are in at Questa is pretty pedestrian – it’s not going to win any awards for beauty or luxury.  It’s basically a small dirt/gravel park with its biggest redeeming value being the view of the snow-capped mountains we have from our RV (see photo below).  Oh, and, of course, for those who know me well, the WiFi is really solid!  The RV park owner is a really nice guy and is very responsive to our needs, so despite it not being the most beautiful park, we are happy enough with it to stay for the entire month.

During some our early exploring of Questa and the surrounding area, Karen was in her element because we were able to see wildlife up close and personal.  The first such encounter was discovering that there is a herd of long-horned sheep that hang out right next to a road we drive on frequently.  Check out some of the photos we took of this group on various days.  They showed zero fear of cars or humans.

Our next unusual wildlife encounter came while we were exploring a park area near Questa known as Rio Grande de Norte National Monument.  It seems like no matter where we go in New Mexico (or southwestern Texas), we never get too far from the Rio Grande river.  The good news about that is there seems to be amazing canyons and gorges everywhere that river is.  But, before we get to that, as we were driving through the national monument area, we finally spotted our first snake…though it wasn’t exactly where we expected…it was in the middle of the road.  It was alive (as opposed to roadkill), but it appeared to be happy to just enjoy the warmth of the road surface, so it wasn’t going anywhere.  Karen, who doesn’t have a fear of snakes, hopped out of the car with the camera and walked over to check it out…though keeping at a respectful distance.  By the way, the national monument park was really beautiful – hopefully some of the photos I post will show that.

So, after talking about a beautiful park, it’s the perfect time to talk about something disgusting, right?  I mean, after all, I promised to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of RVing!  As you know, we love having our dogs with us, but there are certain times when it isn’t all fun and games.  We got to experience that right after visiting the national monument park.  If you have the chance to watch our dogs when we take them exploring and let them off lead, you’d think that we starve them every day.  They are on a perpetual hunt for stuff to eat and, sadly, that often seems to include the feces from other animals.  How can that possibly be appetizing to a dog???  So, that’s disgusting enough right?  Well, that night we get woken up at 2:30 am to a dog whining and an awful smell….one of our dogs had a bout of explosive diarrhea in the RV…ugghhh!!!  While I’ll spare you any more details, I’ll tell you that for the next several days, we were on perpetual watch, including waking up multiple times at night, to get the dog out of the RV if we sensed another bout coming.  Not only did his digestive problems last for several days, right after he was finished, we had an even worse case of it with our other dog.  Boy, did we get sick and tired of dealing with that crap (ha ha).  It really does take some of the fun out of exploring with the dogs if we have to be on high vigilance to keep them from eating stuff rather than our being able to just walk around and appreciate the beauty of the land.

Getting back to the wildlife theme for another minute, Karen and I found another cute, remote town called Eagle Nest, which sits around a very large lake.  Given the name of the town, you’d expect we would see some eagles.  We did see one flying around, but it was challenging to get a good photo of it.  However, just outside of the town, Karen spotted a coyote in a large field that had water flowing through it.  It appeared that the coyote was checking out the water looking for potential prey.  Karen also thinks it might have been pregnant.  She did get a pretty decent photo of the coyote, which I’ve posted below.  Anyway, while we were at Eagle Nest Lake, we had some fun with the dogs romping around in the water and the surrounding area, so, of course, I have to share some photos from that, too!

While the first couple weeks of our stay in Questa focused on exploring nearby mountains, canyons, and forests, the last couple of weeks have been focused more on exploring Taos and some towns further west, as we started to pursue looking for Navajo weaving and crafts.  Karen’s mom was born in Santa Fe NM and spent a lot of time in the New Mexico and Colorado area, so, even though Karen grew up mostly in upstate New York, she has had a lot of southwestern and Native American exposure through her mom’s interests.

Before describing a little more about exploring Taos, let me digress to bring up another reality of RV living.  A couple of weeks ago, Karen contracted a pretty bad cold – something that doesn’t happen to her too often.  When you live in a normal size house and take reasonable precautions, there’s a decent chance that as a spouse, you might be able to escape catching the cold from your wife.  Not the case in the RV…especially when the weather is cold/windy enough that you aren’t spending most of your time outside of the RV.  Yep, when you share less than 400 square feet with a wife that has a bad cold, it’s just a question of when, not if, you’ll get one, too.  So, as I’m writing this, I’m finishing my week of having a bad cold.  Thank you for sharing, honey!

Because Taos sits right next to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and is at an elevation of 7,000 feet, there are many parts of Taos that are really quite scenic, especially when there are several mountaintops that are still snow-covered through May.  Hopefully, I’ve captured some of that in the photos I’ve posted below.  As you approach Taos from the north, you start to see all sorts of small shops on both sides of the road selling artsy stuff, where it appears these are folks trying to eek out a living selling their crafts.  As you get closer to the heart of town, you start to see the stores and galleries of folks of higher means. There is quite a cute and busy little downtown shopping district that clearly relies on tourism.  By the way, this theme of seeing part of the population struggling just to survive right next to those who are affluent is one that Karen and I keep seeing as we make our way through the southwest.  The fact that it exists isn’t surprising to us, it’s that we see it right next to each other…and so dramatically different.  We’ll see someone living in what looks like a soon-to-be-condemned trailer home with trash and rusting vehicles in their small little space around the trailer and then we’ll go right around the corner and see a freshly-built, beautiful adobe home.  We just don’t tend to see those extremes so close together.  It makes it hard to tell if that part of town is dying or growing.

The areas we are visiting clearly don’t have to deal with home owners’ associations and there must be some pretty lax building rules, because we do get to see some very unique housing structures, some of which we doubt could pass building inspections.  In some ways, it’s very refreshing to see fewer rules in place that demand conformity.  It really does start to give you a sense of why this part of the country probably bristles every time it hears about Federal, state, or local governments proposing new rules to control their behavior.  Karen and I understand a little of that just from our own experience of having lived in a townhouse community and then a sub-division community before we moved on to our farm.  Once on the farm, we didn’t have to worry about having our property live up to anyone else’s idea of what it should look like and we really didn’t have to worry much about what our neighbors would think.

So, aren’t all those snow-capped mountain photos cool?  And, isn’t it great that you can look at the snow caps while walking around in 70-degree weather?  Well, that was certainly part of our plan…it’s just too bad that it hasn’t quite worked out that way. The mistake we made was coming up into the mountains of northern New Mexico during the month of May.  When we looked up the average temp in Questa during May, it said the highs averaged 70 and the lows averaged 36.  Okay, so it would a little chilly at night…no prob.  Well, this has not been an average May… winter will just not give up its grip on this area.  We’ve only had a couple of days in the 70s, most in the 50s, and we actually had a snow squall on May 21^st!!  Believe me folks, I’m not telling you this to get any sympathy – we’ve been very fortunate to basically miss winter this year – I’m sharing it more to let you know don’t to come to northern New Mexico until June if you’re looking for warm weather!