Wheeler Peak and Independence Day Weekend

Howdy, everyone!  I hope you all are gearing up for Independence Day, one of my favorite holidays.  I would recommend taking a minute to read some quotes from the men who founded our country.  They were not perfect, but their ideas of self-government and rights innate at birth have produced what I think is the greatest nation in the world, despite its flaws.  We still have a long way to go, and even today we are having the discussion about what it means to "have rights" and to self govern.  Perhaps the chaos that seems to be permeating politics today suggests that we are having one of the hardest discussions, although I think that might be optimistic thinking.

My plans going into this weekend were ____.  That's right, I pretty much had none.  This was the first weekend that I had not made predetermined plans with any friends in NM or with Lindsey since I've been here.  The friends I have that live in Los Alamos have either left for the summer or were going out of town.  I had considered going to the Wild Rivers Recreation Area in Taos to camp, since it is sort of a tradition for Lindsey and I to go on Independence Day weekend, but going by myself seemed like it might get boring.  Because I had nothing to do, I was admittedly a little down.  My only plans were a work barbecue on Saturday, but when you are an outsider like me, being a student intern, it can sometimes be a little intimidating, I guess.

Caballo Pt. 2

I started my Friday morning with a trip to one of my favorite places in Los Alamos, Morning Glory (link to Lindsey's blog post).  I didn't know about Morning Glory until this year, so I don't know how old they are, but until Lindsey brought me my coffee maker, I was going to Morning Glory every day at about 6:10 AM for coffee and doughnuts.  As far as I know, they are the only fresh doughnut makers in town, other than Smith's, and their Old Fashioned doughnuts, both glazed and chocolate iced, are my favorite.  I haven't had any of their cooked food besides their breakfast burritos, but they are seriously the best I've had in Los Alamos, possibly anywhere.  The green chile is hot, the bacon is plentiful and thick cut, the hash browns are well-seasoned, and the tortillas are amazing.  I think they grill the filled burrito on the flattop with all the seasoning, and it just adds that extra flavor that really makes this an excellent burrito.

Inside of a Morning Glory breakfast burrito

Afterwords I decided to tackle my arch-nemesis.  You may remember in my last blog post about Los Alamos I tried to hike to Caballo Peak and failed after realizing that it was a 20-mile round trip.  So, Friday, with nothing else to do, I decided to try doing the 14-mile round trip version of the hike leaving from the Pajarito Ski Area near the lab.

View into the Valles Caldera

Great campsite along the trail

One thing I love about Los Alamos, which I may have mentioned before, is that the abundance of outdoorsy activity here is underrated.  Often I see cities like Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, etc. listed among the top outdoors towns in America, but Los Alamos is probably one of the best out there.  On my way up to the ski area, literally 5 minutes away from my office, I saw people camping with excellent views.  Less than an hour into my hike, I saw a great fire ring with a pristine camping view.  While I generally like to get a little farther away from civilization before setting up camp, I don't know how many cities can offer this kind of escape.

Anyway, I was not able to make it to Caballo Peak.  My feet were still pretty sore and blistered from the hike the previous weekend (San Pedro Parks), and after about 5 miles I got a little disheartened by the fact that I had just descended 1200' into a devastated wash in which it was nearly impossible to find the trail.  Walking in sand was dreadful, and the thought of climbing about 1600' to hit Caballo, then descending, then ascending the 1200' I had just descended kind of took the fun out of the hike, so I turned back.  I hated to give up like that, but when the hiking stops feeling fun it's not worth it to keep going.  I'm going to go a little "sour grapes" here and say that Caballo Peak is not even a peak of any significance.  I was confused and thought it was one of the three highest peaks in the Jemez, but I later learned it wasn't, and now I'm just trying to climb the damn thing to feel successful.  There is one more trail I might try later in the summer that is only about 3 miles long, but it is kind of a pain to get to and also requires hiking in the same wash.

Caballo Peak aka Jerk Mountain

I saw a lot of these berries on the trail and was hoping they were edible.  I was not able to find out any info, so if you know what they are let me know.

The next day I went to the work barbecue and made Carolina Caviar, a kind of slaw/dip that features black eyed peas and corn.  I thought it turned out pretty good, but there was so much tasty food there that only about half of it got eaten.  I had an excellent time at the barbecue chatting with people I, until then, knew either not well or not at all, and a few people succeeded in inflating my ego by telling me how good I was at bags.  I talked to one coworker who made me feel a little better about not being able to do Caballo.  He said it was already a hard hike before fires and floods washed out the trail I was having trouble with, so it's good to know that I'm not a complete failure.

Wheeler Peak

That day I saw on the Los Alamos interns Facebook page that some interns were getting together for a hike to Wheeler Peak, the tallest mountain in New Mexico.  Although my feet were still a little blistery and sore, I figured this might be the last chance in a while I'd get to do this, so I gladly joined.  I woke up at 4 AM on Sunday to drive to the Taos Ski Valley where the trailheads to Wheeler Peak are located.  Wheeler Peak has two main trails to access it from the Taos Ski Valley: the Williams Lake Trail (about 3 miles) and the Bull-of-the-Woods trail (about 7.5 miles).  While the proper trail to choose might seem obvious, consider that both trails have 3500-4000' in elevation gain, but only one of those is spread out over 7 miles.  The plan was to do Bull-of-the-Woods up and Williams Lake down, but after a, I presume, ski area employee told me that starting Bull-of-the-Woods at 7:00 AM would result in reaching the peak at 2:00 PM, we decided to play it safe and do Williams Lake up and play it by ear on doing BotW or Williams Lake down.  I'll say now that this guy was full of shit.  There is no way that, unless you are completely out of shape or not acclimated, it would take 7 hours to do Bull-of-the-Woods up.  His estimate of 3 hours for Williams Lake was somewhat accurate, as it took us about 2.5 hours to reach the peak, but we also spent at least 20 minutes hiking and sightseeing at the lake.  For those that are unaware, being off high peaks by noon is recommended, especially during summer, as afternoon storms can roll in really quickly, and the last thing you want is to be stuck above treeline when a gnarly thunderstorm hits.  Sure enough, even though we didn't spend a minute under the shadow of a cloud the entire trip, by the time we got into Taos around 3:00 PM it was raining in the mountains.

Sign for Williams Lake.  This lake is beautiful and would be an excellent spot to camp, weather permitting, and have a 2 mile handicap for climbing Wheeler Peak in the morning.

The reflection of the cragged peaks is gorgeous

It was shocking how quickly Williams Lake became a little blue dot as we ascended

If I had taken a picture of every attractive wildflower I saw I'd have no space on my phone left, but I had to snap a picture of this Columbine.

Getting excited about marmots here is a bit like getting excited about seagulls at the beach.  The feeling quickly wears off, but these guys were cute and would get just close enough to frighten themselves and run off.

The actual ascent up Williams Lake Trail was not bad, in my opinion.  I am definitely not what one would consider "in shape", but I do work out somewhat regularly and hike about once or twice a week, so, with the pace we were keeping, I actually found the hike borderline easy, surprisingly.  However, both the night before and the morning of this trip I did a lot of stretches hoping to really get myself ready for the hike, and I think this helped greatly.

View from Wheeler Peak looking NNE

View of the summit sign with trail register.

View north from the highest peak marker

Looking SSE from the summit

Obligatory thumbs up from the summit

Picture of the hiking crew, mostly students interning at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Great view north into Colorado

On the return trip we decided Bull-of-the-Woods sounded like a good hike.  We decided to get adventurous, maybe a little too adventurous, and hiked down a ridge that looked like an interesting shortcut.  It turned out to be a rickety rock scree interspersed with goat trails that, while a shorter crows-flight distance, likely added a ton of time to our trip. Later on in the hike, our group saw a trail that two women were hiking up, so "we" chose to hike down it, although at least one person, one of whom has a blog that probably nobody but a few people read, wanted to stay on the trail we were on.  This ended up really taking us away from the trail and eventually onto some bike trails.  Bike trails tend to be very winding, so my guess is that this tacked on at least a mile to the trip, and because of this I'm not really sure of what the total mileage was, but it was upwards of 11 miles just based on trail mileage.  One of our hiking party's step tracker said 16 miles, but I'm dubious of that.  Even with two very lengthy "shortcuts" we were down at 2:30 PM on the dot, bringing our total travel time to 7 hours, including breaks.  So, Mr. Presumed Employee, if you're reading this, you were really wrong, but I forgive you.  Feel free to look at the rest of the pictures I've posted below.  I had a great time doing this hike, and it was fun to turn what looked like kind of a boring, lonely weekend at the outset into a social, adventurous weekend.

A faux-peak.  This peak would be the 2nd highest peak in NM, but it is often not considered due to its low prominence (a measure meant to quantify a peak's ability to be distinguished from surrounding peaks) and proximity to Wheeler Peak.

Wheeler Peak in the center

Pretty hard to see, but there is a bighorn in the center of the screen. It is directly above the biggest rock to the left of the snow bank.  Obviously it looked more impressive in person, but I have to make due with a phone camera for now.

This picture gives some perspective as to how big everything here looks

Taos Ski Valley

We eventually caught back up with the Bull-of-the-Woods Trail near the end

Corrections and notes:

I apologize for the weird formatting of the pictures.  I don't know how to get them center of the screen.  I could just shrink them, but I think they need to be larger to appreciate them.