We opted to stay close to home today and hike in the Santa Fe Forest. We drove up into a residential neighborhood situated at the base of a grouping of mountains. It turns out that Santa Fe has a series of trails called the Dale Ball trails. This covers more than 25 miles of interconnected trails across the city. We opted for the Dorothy Stewart and Atalaya Mountain trails.
We worked our way up to Castle Rock, and then over to Picacho Peak. Along the way we ran into cousins of Cincinnati's villain/star du jour - the cicada.
Their coloration is a bit different and the call is also a bit off, but still felt like a bit of home!
We also ran into this guy -
We slowly, so slowly, worked our way across a saddle over to Atalaya Mountain where Kris bagged his first 9K+ foot peak! Just look at how excited he is!
The descent was pretty much 2500' of unrelenting downhill over sand and walnut- to baseball sized rocks. Fortunately, neither one of us managed to turn an ankle!
By the time we made it back to the car, we were both pretty tired and thirsty so we stopped by a local brewery. Let's just say that MadTree doesn't have anything to worry about.
Dinner tonight was at a restaurant helmed by a James Beard award winning chef. Unfortunately, I didn't notice that he won the award in the 00's and apparently hasn't changed his food since. To be fair, everything was very tasty, if not nostalgia inducing. The best part of dinner was a bottle of wine from Baja Californian of all places. A Bordeaux style blend, it was superb and surprisingly reasonable!
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