Sandia Walkabout

Walkabout, originally uploaded by grynstar.

Yesterday, Sara and I joined a few of her bright-eyed, camelpack sipping, gortex worshipping coworkers and walked across Sandia Mountain. Today, I'm walking very slow and maybe a bit funny.

Sandia rises about a mile above Albuquerque and stretches from the old Hwy 66 town of Tijeras north to the foothill rancheros of Placitas. We had read that one of the local environmental groups planned to hike the 26-mile span next week. It sounded interesting if not stupid, but we couldn't make the date. So, Sara's officemates decided to organize their own death march / nature walk across the Sandias for this weekend.

Despite my comments it was good times. The whole day kept the mountain shrouded in light, cool clouds. We stayed lucky until about 5pm when a dark menacing cloud that was hanging around started thundering and then pouring (see my photo interpretation of that above). At that point we were pretty damn sick of walking anyway, so it may have well been raining.

After the longest damn mile of the whole trip we finally made it back to the car and headed back to town for food and beer.