More up?

Yesterday, Jason, Dominic, and I did a hike in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Truchas, NM-- Truchas is a tiny little town in Espanola north of Santa Fe, but south of Taos. As it turned out, a storm the night before had dumped feet of snow along our planned route, and our SUV was absolutely not gonna make it up the mountain, so we hiked from the bottom of the mountain rather than the official trail start. We'd planned on making it to the basin, but the 1 - 2 feet of snow the entire way really slowed us down, so when we hit the frozen waterfall, we decided to turn back. All told, easily about 1/3 of the way was a steep uphill incline of about 45 degrees in all that white stuff. It was HARD WORK, I tell you. Hence the title of this post: "there's more up?" It took us about five hours to do six miles.

In my personal opinion, you have three options: crazy altitude (we were 9,650 ft up), crazy inclines, and crazy snow. Pick two, but not all three at once, please. We're simply just not that hardcore. (For the record though, Dominic is that hardcore.) I am pleased to report that after an ouchy night, Jason's knees work again and my ankle didn't swell too bad. I did, however, get a lobster-iffic sunburn on my nose, and Jason has a bona-fide red neck.

Not to sound TOO complainy, the view was gorgeous. We saw mountain birds, lots of animal tracks, and the second highest treeline in the US. We want to do the full hike once spring has arrived in its entirety-- I want to see the Basin, and I think it'll be a challenging but not impossible hike if I can, you know, actually touch the ground when I walk. 'Hike' implies that your feet actually tread the ground, and that very rarely happened yesterday!











































...and now I look like this. With a bright red nose.

Today we were a tad less adventurous. We woke up, had breakfast in bed while watching Planet Earth, then headed out for some specialty shopping as well as our usual Sunday errands. We took a detour on zenmaster's advice and stopped at World Market, which was awesome. I want a ton of the lanterns, but I did come back with garlic cheese, sea salt dark chocolate, nutella, and strawberry rhubarb jam.

And now it's dinner time!