After a dozen days away from my home visiting Karen in New Mexico, I got back home last night. While we made her home in Albuquerque our base camp, we were out and about almost all of that time.

This time rather than flying I took my SUV, driving about 2,000 miles all told. That includes the trip to White Sands National Monument about which I wrote you earlier.

Then last Friday I hiked up the Embudo Trail in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness east of Albuquerque while Karen took care of some errands. It was a comfortably warm day but awfully windy on this trail, which means funnel in Spanish — and the wind was certainly funneling though it.
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To start my current trip visiting Karen in Albuquerque she suggested that we take a backpacking trip. Since northern New Mexico still has a lot of snow, she suggested we go to southern New Mexico.

This was to be my first backpacking trip in 20 years. It was Karen’s first in 30 years. She already had a backpack and pad for her sleeping bag. But last week I picked up one for her in Boulder’s REI that zips together to mine.

I checked out my New Mexico hiking guides, and found one place that they all say is special — White Sands National Monument. It happens that I had stopped there in 1977, when I moved back to California from DC, but had never hiked there. Karen had never gone there at all.

I had come down from Boulder on Friday in a 9-hour drive on Saturday and rested on Sunday. Yesterday morning we made the 4-hour drive straight south to White Sands.
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When I was a growing up, I was about the most unathletic kid imaginable, especially for team sports. But now that I have matured a bit, I have more sports than I have time. My sports are still generally solitary: Hiking, working out on the treadmill, snowshoeing, and cycling (in the order in which I added them to my repertoire).

After yesterday’s snow, today was crystal clear, albeit cool and a bit windy. The mountains called strongly for another snowshoeing trip. But I had appointments that kept me in town this morning.
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“Where is the best snowshoeing in the park today,” I asked the ranger at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park this morning.

“The Bear Lake corridor,” she replied. “The trail to Emerald Lake or the one to Bierstadt Lake. There’s a volunteer at Bear Lake you can ask.”

When I got there, I did.
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