City of Rocks, and some celebrations

To start off with a few celebrations, and to put some people in here before we go back to empty vistas and rocks, back in November we had a lovely zoom Thanksgiving! We were able to find a time that worked for Nana and Grandpa in Kansas City, Liam and Kat and Debbie, Jeff and Maddie in Chicago, Miles in Portland, and us in Silver City. We had a good time catching up then played a little game where we submitted anonymous answers in advance saying what each of us was grateful for, and we read them out and guessed who said what. Once the scores were tallied, Liam and Miles were announced as the joint winners, but most importantly we all had a good time!

One thing that’s common across in person and zoom group photos is that they’re hard to get right. So we have two here to show everyone.

Then, on Dec 11, Maddie turned 8! She got to wear a birthday crown for school, and she also got some nice cat pajamas and Star Wars legos. Maddie (and Jeff) are big into Star Wars.

As promised, on to rocks of the Chihuahuan desert! The region we are in is the Chihuahuan Desert, which stretches from southern New Mexico, Texas and a bit of Arizona and across north central Mexico almost as far south as Mexico City. It’s the largest desert in North America. There was a lot of volcanic activity in the area, which is what formed the large rock formations that sit on the landscape, otherwise in a big flat plain, at City of Rocks. The rocks are spaced out regularly and have paths between them, resembling a city. Here’s an overview from a lookout point we hiked up to.

From the City of Rocks, you can see another circle of rocks on the hill. The hill is where this first pic is taken from, so think of this larger city and smaller city being adjacent. We took to calling the smaller nearby city “Evanston.” Here’s Evanston, from (of course) Chicago.

Here are some more photos from Evanston. The park is really well maintained, with a shaded picnic spot at the top of this observation point.

The park is in very limited access mode due to Covid, and only open to NM residents (which fortunately included temporary residents who could prove current residency in NM!) for day use on weekends. But during normal times, it must be a really great place to camp. There are campsites with space for tents, and with picnic tables and fire pits set up all throughout the city area. The park is a popular place for stargazing too (no pesky light pollution out here!) and many of the campsites are named after planets, stars and parts of the universe. It would be a super fun place for kids, we kept thinking! Here’s a typical campsite.

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We had a really great time walking all around, exploring the hidden corners of the park, and generally enjoying the sunshine and moderate winter weather. I’ll end on a series of rock photos that may be too much for all but the biggest rock enthusiasts, but every scene there begged for a photo, so we ended up with quite a few pics! As Rob, the photographer I worked with at UChicago would say, it was like shooting in a barrel. Note the last photo was set up as an accident waiting to happen with that big rock balanced way above me!

This last photo now looks like a freak accident waiting to happen! That large rock at the top looks very precarious!