New Mexico Remarkable Landforms

By Marcia Milner-Brage, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

My geology hound husband guided us to amazing locales during our two week stay in the Santa Fe area at the end of October. The beauty of this High Dessert landscape—its vastness, its landforms, its colors—all so different from the Midwest US where we live—was at times overwhelming to me. My partner of 38 years looked out trying to name the many peaks and mesas. He sought to understand how the land came to be over millions and millions of years. Was it volcanic eruption? Rifts in the earth’s crust? Mountain formation from shifting tectonic plates? Sedimentation left by an extinct inland sea? Erosion by wind and water?

As for me, the artist to his scientist, I looked out just trying to see. All I hoped for was to transfer something of my view and feelings of the place into drawings.

Here are a few. My husband was my geology consultant.

To get to the top of this mesa (part of Bandelier National Monument) we climbed ladders, supplied by the National Park Service, and transited footpaths worn into the soft white tuff by the Tsankawi people who lived here from the 15th to 16th century. I looked out to the distant rounded, volcanic peaks of the Caja del Rio Plateau, the closer Buckman Mesa, and the valley below.

The house where we stayed on the outskirts of Santa Fe was in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I painted from the portico, looking northwest. Closer was an eroded landscape of pointy, pink, small peaks. Beyond, the broad Rio Grande valley with the Jemez Mountains in the distance.

Foothills of Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Jemez Mountains beyond

From this same portico, I did a rapid ink sketch of a storm coming from over the Jemez Mountains. Curtains of rain from voluminous clouds approached from many miles away before a single drop of rain. When overhead, there was loud thunder, roiling wind, and finally sleet and rain slapped the windows and metal roof. So dramatic, especially for a place that has had drought for several years.

Rain, Jemez Mountains

1.25 million years ago a volcanic eruption, with a force 300 times greater than Mount Saint Helens’ eruption in 1980, created a 13-mile wide crater.  We drove narrow roads, with switchbacks, 8,500 feet into the Jemez Mountains. The Valles Caldera is now a vast pristine meadow. One of the most tranquil places I’ve ever experienced, as if its fiery origin is now being balanced out by a gentle, cool restfulness.

Valles Caldera rimmed by Jemez Mountains

And then the most fantastical landforms at the end, the rock formations at The Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument on the Pajarito Plateau:

Tent Rocks from Cave Loop Trail

Residual left from volcanic events about 6-7 million years ago, tent rocks are pumice, ash, and tuff deposits over 1,000 feet thick, some 90 feet high.

Tent Rock Pillar

Here a hoodoo–a pumice and tuff pillar, precariously capped with a boulder. I felt I was in a world out of a Dr. Seuss storybook.

My first post from this New Mexico trip HERE.