Mountains

After leaving Gallup we traveled via Arizona to get to Silver City on a relatively untraveled north-south road. The road itself went through some beautiful areas, much of it in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness and on two-lane highway (where in 70 miles we saw only 8 cars), and reminded me of the country described in Leopold's "Thinking Like a Mountain", one of my favorite essays about nature and man's relationship with it. Toward the end of his essay he writes:


"We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run."


A lot of the land we traveled through was anti-wolf, and it was interesting to see how it was manifested through billboards and the occasional pelt tacked up in warning. The rhetoric became a bit more pro-nature as we traveled into Silver City, NM, and then up to our cabin rental in Pinos Altos. The cabin was quite fantastic, and we drove over somewhat icy roads to get there. The forecast called for snow for Monday and Tuesday, and when we woke up on our first morning there was a full two inches on the car, and plows were traveling up the roads next to the cabin.

Although it was still snowing, the day was supposed to warm up, we took a morning hike up the mountain on an old forest road. The snow had fallen on ice, so I decided to wear my Yaktrax and Rich his crampons from his old fieldwork in the UK. Since Smith had nice strong feet, he was pretty steady on the ice and snow. This paid off well for him in scrambling up the mountain, and eventually as he tried to track some javelina that had walked across the fresh snow. We got some good pictures of him sticking his nose into the different footprints. When we took a break at the top we invented a game to distract him, but to keep him interested in sniffing out things. We stuck an M&M inside a snowball and threw it so that he could chase it down the trail. He would go get the snowball and then break it apart to get to the candy inside, and was having a lot of fun. Later as we got back to the cabin he saw an actual javelina hanging around outside the cabins, and so it was pretty exciting for him having the real (and smelly) thing around.

We hadn't gone into any cities or done any window shopping at all, but decided to go into Silver City to have a look around their downtown area. The shops were eclectic but nice, and generally fairly dog-friendly so they let him come in as we looked around. By that time Smith was getting fairly tired, so it was back home and then a relaxing evening watching more snow fall.