Days 44-51: Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico

Over the past 24 hours, I lost 6,000 feet in elevation and gained 30 degrees at night.

Hello, Texas.

But before that -

A week ago today, my mom and I got up at 4am to see the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We ate green chile and bacon breakfast burritos in the pre-dawn cold. Here are some fiesta photos, courtesy of my mom - our guest photographer this week.

A good photographer can make any place look beautiful. Just yesterday, the New York Times had a cover photo of a beach in Mogadishu that made me think - hey, I'd go there.

Santa Fe doesn't need the help.

With its trademark adobe and red brick buildings, turquoise-trimmed windows, and fall colors, every block would make a great picture.

Ironically, then, I have no good photos of Santa Fe.

I was too busy drinking coffee and enjoying my mom's company.

At Tent Rocks National Monument, we scrambled through narrow canyons and admired the minaret rocks.

If you're ever in northern New Mexico, check out the mineral pools at Ojo Caliente. You can coat yourself with mud and bake in the sun, then dip in iron, soda and arsenic pools. Yes, arsenic! Flirt with danger..

Now I miss my mommy. I will have to soothe myself with migas here in Austin.

Days 37-43: Arches, Mesa Verde and the Pinto Bean Capitol of the World

When you see the pictures in this post, you will not empathize at all with the following statement:

This week was kinda boring.

I mean, relatively.

With my mom flying into Albuquerque today for a week of exploring New Mexico (yay!), I found myself killing some time in the Pinto Bean Capitol of the World (Dove Creek, Colorado) and Santa Fe National Forest this week.

Despite having 3-4 days worth of compelling stuff to do in the past 7 days, the pictures suggest enough beauty to fill 10 days. Or more.

And the pictures are probably right.

Arches National Park in southeast Utah is a photographer's dream. There are improbable red rock formations, including arches of course, that look lit from within at sunrise and sunset. Delicate Arch is the iconic image of Utah: it even appears on their license plate.

There is only one hike of any significant length in Arches: Devil's Garden. For much of this hike, there is no trail as such. You look for cairns (piles of rocks) set upon rock formations to figure out where the trail is. At times, you cross "fins." A fin is basically a narrow rock bridge that you walk across in 40 mph winds and hope you don't die. Here's the scariest one (I had to kneel down to turn around and take a picture of it, and my stomach still flipped as I craned around to take this picture for you, dear friend).

Utah's scenic highway 211 takes you to Canyonlands National Park, a huge and largely undeveloped park south of Arches. The mix of fall colors and red rocks was gorgeous.

Get ready for a non-ironic Stephen Colbert moment. I am finally learning what is awesome about RVing. It's not parking in a gravel lot with five feet between you and another fiberglass behemoth, cooking outside on a hot plate. It's this: did you know you can camp FOR FREE pretty much anywhere you want in national forests and land owned by the Bureau of Land Management? God bless America! Check out my campsite outside Canyonlands. I expected John Wayne to ride by.

Roadside attraction: a house built into rock in the 1950s.

Speaking of building houses into rocks, let's move on to Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado. When I was in middle school, there were organized school trips every spring break. One I never took was to Mesa Verde. So my inner teenager was pretty excited to come here.

In the 13th century, ancestral Puebloans built towns into nooks just below the mesa-top. These towns are preserved at Mesa Verde, which is also a UNESCO world heritage site.

Native Americans lived in the Four Corners area (where modern-day Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet) from about 800 to 1200 A.D. Around 1200, ancestral Puebloans moved up from the lowlands to build these towns into canyon walls. Was this due to increasing violence and the need for towns they could fortify? No one knows. But, then, around 1300, they promptly abandoned these towns and moved south.

Looking at these towns, and native American pottery and other artifacts at the Anasazi Heritage Center (where I broke my unofficial 'no museums' rule for this trip), I felt humbled by the sophistication of these cultures. Portraits taken of native Americans in the 19th century suck your gaze in. These people were clearly not to be trifled with. I would like to learn a lot more about these cultures.

And that's good, because I haven't felt moved to learn anything for weeks.

Days 30-36: The Colorful State

(Please don't forget everything I said about Wyoming in my last post. It is a wild, distinctive place that I hope you will check out. And yet..)

Laramie is a dreary city in southeast Wyoming. There doesn't seem much to do besides eat fast food until you're morbidly obese, or experiment with meth. Though I did see a CrossFit.

Driving south on highway 287 from Laramie, you begin to notice little pops of red rocks coming out of the ground. These rock-sprouts are strong willed, insouciant. Who gave them the right to pop up like that? How did rocks start to rise up from the earth?

Shortly after the first red rock sighting, it's like someone flipped a switch from Ugly to Pretty. Scrubby hills give way to tree-covered mountains.

Welcome to Colorado.

I spent a few days in the greater Denver area, catching up with friends. I won't tell you too much about Denver, because big cities are kind of off limits for this blog. The places in-between are the ones I'll focus on. Let me limit myself to one photo and one piece of advice.

First, the advice - if you ever find a great job or fabulous significant other in Denver, definitely check it out. 300 days of sun per year, fabulous network of bike trails throughout the city, your usual cool urban stuff, and beautiful mountains all around. Here's a shot from Denver's Cherry Creek bike trail:

But (friends aside!) my favorite part of Colorado wasn't the Denver area. It was the mountains west of the city. OK, so you have heard of Vail, Breckenridge, Aspen, Telluride. I knew these places as ski resorts, and had no idea if driving through in October would be anything special.

WOW. I was blown away by how beautiful it is up there. There are a bunch of scenic drives that wind through old mining towns, deciduous and evergreen forests, and mountain lakes. You are more than 10,000 feet above sea level, so some of the tallest peaks in the continental US look like hills.

One of these small towns is Leadville (forgive the poor photo quality):

In Gunnison, I went for a run and spotted a few places I'd love to live:

Turns out I'm not the first big city person to want to live in this part of Colorado.

Finally, a rant about iOS6 and Apple's horrid new version of Maps. These days, I am a Maps power user and Apple's garbage has thrown me for a loop. In the past week, Apple maps has:

1. Suggested a route through 100 miles of Forest Service roads, instead of main highways.

2. Siri has barked at me "Turn right onto I-70 East." Then, 30 seconds later, "turn left on I-70 West."

3. Let's not forget the basic design flaw that you can't easily see the next step that's upcoming in the directions. This means that you don't know which lane to get in - which is a major bummer in a 29' vehicle in a big city.

And yes, Tim Cook, you CAN use Google Maps or Bing or whatever instead. But when you are using maps programs in a browser, they will reload whenever you open up Safari - and if you are out of cell range, you are SOL.

Until Apple is shamed into giving us back Google Maps, I'm using a great new Maps app I found: