Bury Me in the Valle

Bury Me in the Valle, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Last weekend I spent a day doing trail work in the San Pedro Parks Wilderness of the Santa Fe National Forest. Saturday morning I woke up and after a long drive was pulling into the one street Town of Cuba where I was to meet the recreation guy, Dave. The sun was long from up and the stars still sprinkled the pre-dawn sky.

I got to Dave's and we picked up the Forest Service truck, loaded our gear and headed into the mountains as the sun slowly pulled itself into the New Mexico sky.

I had brought a full pack, and was intending to stay overnight. Dave had pretty much decided he was only going to spend the day, but said he'd pick me up the next day. It's getting cold up here in mountains at night, but it's a beautiful scene. The elk are bugling and the aspens have donned their golden coats.

The sun came up over the horizon just as we were moving east along a crest that took us to the southeastern corner of the San Pedro Parks Wilderness boundary. It was only a few minutes to the trailhead, and as we pulled into the parking area it was just light enough to see that our truck had a completely flat tire. Good omen.

We fixed the tire with a spare, put the flat in the truck bed, hoped it wouldn't be lifted, and then headed into the woods. The plan was to clear out an overgrown trail and then restore user-created trails that had become a spider web of dirt walkways in the a nearby meadow.

It was 3 miles in, so we didn't waste much time. We walked north through the mixed conifer forestlands. The trails were muddy and well trodden (hunting season), but the ground was made hard from the cold. The trail climbed up into the spruce/fir forests, which were interspersed with soccer-field like valles (meadows) that wore a carpet of yellow grasses blanketed in frost.

After a little more than an hour we made it to the work site in the Wilderness and began sawing, lopping, and scattering the slash from a large clump of blue spruce trees that had completely blocked the trail.

This trail was on the side of a valle that housed the Rio Anastasio. Thie Anastasio is barely a stream. Yet the new trails lower in the meadow had caused the formation of new arroyos that were slowly pulling the side of the valle into the streambed. We sawed down several trees that were blocking the real trail and used the slash to block the wandering dirt paths and control the erosion they had caused.

Halfway through the day it began raining, then hailing, and then raining again. We kept working, but I was all welt and decided not to camp overnight with the hunters and cold rain. We eventually finished up and headed back south through the valles and towering douglas firs. The trails had become brown glue and a heavy white cloud began to hover over the open meadows.

Tired, muddy, and wet we were quiet with content on our drive back to town . I had a good day with Dave and began thinking of my return sometime soon when there's better weather.