Bill & Jan's Excellent Adventure: A weeks' catchup and a few missing pictures

My last post was a quick note absent any pictures, so after a week here in Santa Fe I wanted to get caught up and show you a couple pictures. We have been experiencing sensational weather, low to mid 70's in the day, and down in the 40's at night, and no humidity. Santa Fe is a comfortable place for us as we've been coming here for 20 years, and with family right down the road in Albuquerque, it feels pretty homey to us. It also gives us an opportunity to see and visit with more family, especially now that Karen and Tom are building in Taos, so both Jan's sisters and their families are here, her mother Vivian, and our niece and her family, and our daughter and her family isn't too, too far away in Lubbock. We tend to get together, enjoy meals together, get some errands done, ship in some stuff we need, and do a few of the things that need done even as we travel, such as flu shots.

So first back to Jan's mom Vivian's birthday lunch. It was 10 days ago but I was remiss not putting a picture up in celebration of her 94th birthday.

From left to right:
Jan, Tom, the back of my head, the Birthday girl Vivian, Nancy, and CT
Karen the photographer is missing

We had a nice time and will get to see Viv a few more times before we officially head east to Florida for the winter.

I mentioned that Jan, Karen, and Tom went on an epic horseback ride in Taos before we came down here so I wanted to put a couple of those pics on as well.

After we met for green chili cheeseburgers at Santa Fe Bite, we walked around for a few hours near the square, and then Tom, the only one still working, had to go back east to the real world:)

Jan and I had in the past driven by a place west of Los Alamos that captured our eye. It is a huge caldera, 13.7 miles in diameter that has hundreds of elk grazing at certain times of the year. We had never driven in the entrance road as it appeared to be a private ranch or something.

We are huge fans of the TV show Longmire, a story based on Craig Johnson's books, the Walt Longmire Mysteries. It's a story of the sheriff, Walt Longmire, set in fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming as he deals with various issues and the nearby Cheyenne reservation with his best friend, Henry Standing Bear. It is, at least to us, a very appealing show, a great plot line, Walt and Henry are very upstanding role models, it is set in an absolutely gorgeous place, so the scenery in the show is amazing. Jan and I have this little dream of having a small log cabin with a view, set in the west with a wooded backdrop, and since seeing Longmire's cabin, we have said his cabin is ideal, almost exactly our dream place. Now the funny thing is the whole show is shot in New Mexico, not Wyoming, and guess what, Longmire's cabin is right there in the caldera!! The Valles Caldera National Preserve. Once we learned that, we wanted to go if we ever got a chance. Before you think we've lost our minds, we have never done anything like this before, there is just something about this place that really intrigues us. Turns out the first time we saw the caldera it wasn't open to the public so we weren't that far off, but now it is administered by the National Park Service, so our pass got us in. You drive into the visitor center, a couple miles, but the rest of the preserve is regulated, they only allow 35 vehicles past the gate onto the 40 some miles in the park. We were lucky and got a back country pass. We talked with a very informative ranger about the caldera and it's history, then we asked our question, "Where is Longmire's cabin?", we got a "look", but then she smiled and we found out that there have been many, many movies and TV shows filmed in the caldera. She took us out on the porch of the visitor center and pointed a mile or so away to Longmire's cabin! And yes we could drive right up to it along the road to the rest of the park. We were tickled.

The caldera itself used to be part of a land grant from Mexico, a square portion of land comprising 100,000 acres given to the Baca family, it was later owned by a family, Bond that ran sheep on the property, than changed hands again, and was logged, and then finally in 2000 the federal government bought the property minus a small corner sacred to the Santa Clara Pueblo, and minus another corner for the Bandelier National Monument, so now it is 89,000 gorgeous acres of mostly grasslands that are golden this time of year. It also has several creeks and a river that cut through it that you can fish in for trout with your back country permit. We wondered about that as these rivers are at most 3 feet wide meandering through the grass. We spent most of the day driving through this beautiful place, had a picnic, fished a little, quite the challenge I might add, walked a bit, and finally had coffee sitting on Walt Longmire's porch! It was a fabulous day in a fabulous place.

An example of how small the rivers were but,
amazingly full of trout

This is an old sheepherder's cabin way up in the north end of the caldera

He had quite a view huh?

Now I've saved the best for last:)

Walt's cabin

Driving up, you see this scene often in the show

On the show this is the view from his cabin

And another

Jan finishing her coffee on Longmire's porch
She's not posing, she's hiding the No Admittance sign:)

I know you're sick and tired of this info by now, but I bet you'll have to admit this is a pretty idyllic and gorgeous place even forgetting it has anything to do with a TV show.

So we decided to take a "shortcut" back to Santa Fe, saved us 20 miles, but added about 45 minutes to the drive. It was a rough narrow road that dropped down off the Jemez Mountains to the Cochiti Lake. This was the site of a Las Conchas fire in 2011, the largest wildfire in New Mexico's history. The area is still devastated.