At the Office

My hubby, Park Ranger Leon is assigned to Kasha-Katuwe/Tent Rocks National Monument near where we live, just a few miles down the road. In most seasons hundreds of visitors to Tent Rocks can hike the narrow trail up to the mesa. Because it is a terminal trail, people must come back the way they went up, sometimes passing others in the very narrow canyon.

The Monument has been closed since mid-March, because of the COVID pandemic, not only because of the close quarters on the trail but because visitors must go through a part of Cochiti Pueblo land to get there and the Pueblos have all been closed to non-residents as a precaution against COVID.

Because his work station has been closed, Leon has been reassigned to more remote areas under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. These are wilderness areas set aside as wilderness study areas or for hiking, biking, hunting, camping and shooting. Leon patrols the trails, does trail maintenance, removes trash (he can't believe the amount of garbage people dump in these remote locations) repairs/replaces signage, repairs barbed wire fences, and generally does a lot of traveling on dirt roads.

So Leon wanted me to see one of the area where he's been patrolling and yesterday took me to "the office" where he works. Here are a few photos of the views from his window.

Cabezon on the left

 

 Hike to the Guadalupe Ruins, an outlying Chaco culture structure.

View from the Ruins

Benni inspecting the stonework

Kiva

A piece of Chacoan pottery

Along one of the roads...on the way to an old Stagecoach way-station.

Another view of Cabezon

Cool rock formations are common in New Mexico

 

 

The people who build this old Stagecoach structure were not quite as precise or adept with stonework as the Anasazi/Chacoan peoples whose structures lasted thousands of years longer. This structure is caving in in several places.