Drinking in the High Desert

No, I’m not referring to margaritas—although I did sip on several delicious varieties during my week in Santa Fe, including a spicy pepper concoction whose sunny disposition made me want to dance in the desert and sing silly songs. But the mouth-watering, Mexico-inspired cuisine of this Sanctuary City was but a tantalizing appetizer for its surrounding landscape in spring, which soothed my soggy soul after the Northwest winter.

I am foremost a woman of green forests and glacial peaks. To live on an island where both the Cascade and Olympic ranges can be seen from shore—to monitor carnivores in these mountains summer after summer, year after year—is a fantastical existence I would trade for no other.

Yet as I wandered the steep-walled narrows of Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument, where I also explored cliff dwellings of ancestral Pueblo peoples and celebrated the recent return of reintroduced beavers whose dams of willow and aspen were masterpieces of nature—

as I observed Gunnison’s prairie dogs emerge from their burrows in the Valles Caldera, a 14-mile-wide volcanic depression comprising vast meadows that evoked the Serengeti, and where massive eruptions 1.2 million years ago produced the ash and tuff rock into which Puebloans eventually carving their dwellings and petroglyphs at nearby Bandelier—

I felt privy to a different and quiet sort of beauty that brought me solace and joy.