Thursday, November 6, 2008

Lost in the fallen leaves

I recently went letterboxing with my neighbor, Lisa, in Santa Fe. You can read her narration here. I liked these photos.




And these portraits of Lisa and myself.



Then, just a few days ago, we went letterboxing again. We went to the 4th of July picnic grounds which is famous for it's fall colors. Howcver, surprisingly, it's actually named for a spring there and not the brilliant colors of the leaves.

Before we saw the pretty leaves, we saw acres of burned forests from the recent Trigo fire.



Here's Jenna with a backseat view.


We began our walk on the nature trail. In this picture, if you look closely, you can see a bushy tailed squirrel.


Apparently, this tree was hit by lightning. See the burnt out bottom?

Fallen leaves were everywhere! I know we don't have the magnificent range of colors that they have in New England, but it's still quite beautiful.


Time out for some Mother-Daughter play! See the pretty red leaf Lisa is holding up?


Some of the trees are characters! Look at these two!


We found the letterbox and had some fun making rubbings of leaves with crayons. In the letterbox was a "hitchhiker" box. This meant that we needed to take it with us and rehide it at the next letterbox we visited.

Everywhere in New Mexico are little villages, each with their central church. This is one we drove past. Notice the pretty tin cuppola. I found the turquoise accent color both pretty and different.


Quarai indian ruins weren't too far away from here so we decided to go and get some sunset photos (and another letterbox that I didn't have, although Lisa did .)

The sky looked ominous. I thought the alien spaceships were coming in for a landing.

Since Quarai is an historic momument, it closes at 5PM. We got there about 4:55. However, the ranger was kind enough to allow us a few minutes for a sunset photo shoot.




Isn't this gorgeous?


I was surprised to see the strange yellow flowers this cactus had.

And one final parting shot of an old barn in the village of Manzano on the way home.

Lost in the fallen leaves - song: No control, artist: David Bowie, album: Outside

3 comments:

Laughing Orca Ranch said...

You took some amazing photos.

The trees with the squirrel look like two lovers dancing cheek to cheek.

And the lightning burned tree looks like a cyclops! Do you see it, too?

What fun times. :)

~Lisa

lytha said...

hi there, i just found your blog thru your comment in mine. very lovely, positive blog! i have never been to new mexico but now i want to see it. my husband and i would like to go geocaching in all 50 states so i think we'll get to see it someday. thankfully we "conquered" the east coast on our honeymoon this summer. new mexico looks like you have a lot, a lot of riding. is that true?

now i regret not picking one of those david bowie pics for my halloween (ghost it forward) blog entry. i had my finger on two nice pics of him....then again, i was kind of scared to admit how much i like the film "the hunger"!

i have a question for you. we try to do as many letterbox/cache hybrids as possible, but i'm curious about the sport of letterboxing in europe. is it popular here? i have no idea what people do in europe for fun (besides nordic walking, sheesh!).

ok now i'm gonna go read more of your blog! thanks for stopping by mine!

~lytha in germany

Fantastyk Voyager said...

Lisa, As you know, I love trees! I think J. R. R. Tolkein had it right when he wrote about "tree ents". lol.


Hi Lytha, welcome!
Yes, Bowie certainly has a lot of "Halloween" faces.

Yes, there is letterboxing in Europe. See http://www.letterboxing-germany.de/ The letterboxing sport is only 10 years old in America. It actually started in England over 100 years ago.