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| Rio Grande River hundreds of feet below the bridge. (Photo by Tom Baugh) |
My wife Penny (http://artjourney-penny.blogspot.com)
and I recently had the opportunity to visit the Rio Grande Gorge in the
northwestern part of the US state of New Mexico. Although not as deep and nowhere near as wide
as the Grand Canyon, the Rio Grande Gorge is a very impressive rift, a very
deep place in the Earth. The Taos Mesa
is an immense extent of sagebrush covered land, dotted here and there with the
signs of humanity, that stretches for
miles. Even on a sunny day there is a brooding aspect to this place. The frequent patchy clouds sail across the
sky, pushed by the ever present winds, and darken the earth below in great
shifting patches of a natural melancholy.
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| Dwarf yucca among the lava boulders. (Photo by Tom Baugh) |
You can visit the Gorge in several different ways. For example, you can drive across the Gorge
on a bridge located a little north and west of the community of Taos. The Gorge isn’t obvious until you are right
upon it. One moment you are driving on a
hard asphalt surface with high desert seemingly on all sides and in the next
moment you are suspended in space on a thin ribbon of concrete and steel with
the Rio Grande winding far below and nothing but very empty space under you. It
can be a breath-taking experience to come upon
the Gorge and its namesake river in this way. This is an incredibly fractured lava land with
great chucks of black rock descending from the rims of the Gorge deep into the
river itself.
Continued in the next
post.
