October 17th was the only day in our 12-day trip that I didn't take any nature pictures. We did cultural things in Santa Fe like visiting the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Art, both of which we walked to from our conveniently located hotel. We visited a former Austin friend now living in Santa Fe whom we hadn't seen in two decades. We visited our used laundry and made it clean.
As if to compensate for the photographic day off, on October 18th, which happened to be the Lady Eve's birthday, I had one of the busiest and best photographic days of this trip or any other. Although in the 1970s I'd spent weeks in the Santa Fe area, neither then nor on brief visits in later decades do I recall ever having driven up Hyde Park Rd. (Highway 475) into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of the city, where people go skiing in the winter. That's where we spent our morning, and a glorious morning it was.
As the road climbed we began to see isolated aspens (Populus tremuloides) or small groups of them whose leaves had turned their famous yellow. The top picture, taken during a brief stop at Hyde Memorial State Park, is an example of that.
And then we drove higher and eventually got to a place where suddenly a whole mounded hillside of yellow-leaved aspens loomed into view, as the second photograph shows.
For a different sort of "mound," consider the frozen puddle
I found at my feet during one photo stop in the mountains.
© 2022 Steven Schwartzman
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