Friday, our first morning in Santa Fe, I awoke early, and made a miserable pot of coffee, way underestimating the amount of coffee needed to make a pot. Ann did a better job at the second pot so I left the coffee making to her for the rest of the trip. In the daylight, I got to look at the house, furnished in a southwestern motif, and the surrounding lot via the large plate glass windows on two sides of the living room.
As we sat in the living room of the house in the foothills of northeast Santa Fe at 7100 feet, I looked out the windows to see that the house was on the side of a hill, nestled among piñones and junipers. The Sangre de Cristos and the Santa Fe Baldy peak were visible directly east out the window, highlighted against the bright blue sky. Clouds would be few and far between during this visit. The story goes that the mountains are called Blood of Christ because they often take on a pink hue from the sun at dawn and dusk. I have never witnessed this, having only hiked through the mountains, never being far enough away from them to see the sun striking them.
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| Sangre de Cristo Range |
Taking advantage of the abundant scrub cover on the hillside were dozens and dozens of birds. I took the opportunity to photograph a few including a few Lesser Goldfinches. The males of this particular race have nearly solid black backs and yellow undersides. Some races that I have seen have much less distinctive back coloration, but they all look different than the American Goldfinches we have in Oregon.
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| Male Lesser Goldfinch |
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Western Bluebird with Colorado Juniper Berry
Our Mountain Bluebirds Have no Chestnut Patches |
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| Western Bluebirds in Silhouette |
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| Dark-eyed Junco in Piñon |
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| Female Yellow-Shafted Flicker |
Before heading into Santa Fe for lunch and some shopping, the guys wanted to show us around a bit, so we headed out towards the Santa Fe Opera through the village of Tusuque. The fences and gates along Bishop's Lodge Road are festooned with signs decrying Bishop’s Lodge plan to discharge treated wastewater into Little Tusuque Creek. I don’t have a horse in this race, but it seems that the natives are restless.
We climbed a hill to their former house site in Monte Sereno and took in the mountains to the east and west. On descending the hill, we then drove the short distance to the SF Opera. Up on its own hill, the opera building has great views of the Sangre de Cristos from the parking lot.
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| Sangre de Cristo Vista from Santa Fe Opera |
From the beautiful opera property north of town, we headed into downtown Santa Fe, where we parked in a big lot with extremely small spaces reminding me of parking spots in Europe. The first thing I saw on exiting the parking lot was a Gruet tasting room. Gruet is a New Mexico-based producer of sparkling wine, wine that is of very good quality for its price, wines that I drank much of in Virginia. We have not drunk any Gruet since moving to Oregon simply because we make oceans of decent sparkling wine in the Willamette Valley. In fact, until I saw the sign on the tasting room, Gruet was but a distant memory in the back of my mind.
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| Home of Great Sparkling Wine |
From the parking lot, we went to a local restaurant for an early lunch where we had lackadaisical service. Ann really enjoyed her sopaipilla at La Choza the evening before so she ordered one after her brunch. It was so undercooked that she dubbed it an "albino pita." La Choza spoiled us.
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| Ann's Chiles Rellenos |
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| My Breakfast Burrito with Green Chile |
After brunch, we set out on a walk around downtown. I snapped a few photos as we walked. The southwestern motifs, influenced by the native tribes and the Spanish conquerors alike, attracted my eye everywhere we walked.
Like many cities around the world, Santa Fe is built around a central square, in Spanish, a plaza. The central gathering place in Santa Fe is not an open, paved square such as many. Rather, it is filled with grass and trees with walkways from the corners and sides meeting at a central obelisk. As we would see later in the evening, the trees are decorated with lights for Christmas and the lampposts in the park are festooned with ristras, strings of dried red chiles that add their color to the holiday decorations.
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| Plaza Left, Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi Ahead |
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| Ristras in the Plaza |
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| New Mexico Museum of Art Just off the Plaza |
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| Detail of the Museum of Art |
One of the aims of our walk was to see the Palacio de los Gobernadores. Fronting the north side of the plaza, the Palace of the Governors dates to the very early 1600s and was the seat of the governor of the Nuevo México territory, which comprised most of the current American Southwest.
This phenomenal-looking one-level adobe building is a classic example of the Territorial Style of Pueblo architecture. Since I first encountered Pueblo and Pueblo Revival architecture as a teenager, I have enjoyed the vernacular, especially because it is like no other style of architecture in the US.
Key features of the style include building with adobe (now often block and stucco), flat roofs, vigas (prominent, often round rafter beams that protrude beyond the walls), latillas (the exposed branches or sawn boards across the vigas that form the ceiling), and canales (protruding ports that drain rainwater off the roof). And you will often encounter portales, covered walkways formed by extending the vigas well beyond the interior walls of the structure. The vigas that support the walkway ceiling and roof are generally supported themselves by posts and beams.
No longer a government building, the Palacio de los Gobernadores, a National Historic Landmark, has housed the New Mexico History Museum for well over a century. Under the auspices of the museum, each day, native artisans display their wares for sale to the public under the long portal. The artisans must belong to federally accepted native tribes and must apply to sell their wares.
The extremely high quality goods included a lot of jewelry, especially in silver with turquoise, but also plenty of copper and other stones. There were some fabrics and rugs on display as well as a lot of pottery in a couple of different color ways, black-white-terracotta and stunning black-on-black.
One of the highlights of our amble was our fascinating talks with the artisans who were selling their goods beneath the portal. We spent a long while talking with them. That left me in awe of the painstaking processes that they go through, especially the many step process to make the ancestral black-on-black pottery wares.
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Portal of the Palacio de los Gobernadores
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| Looking Down the Portal |
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| Vigas and Latillas of the Portal |
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| Jewelry and Jemez Pottery for Sale |
After visiting with the artisans, we continued our stroll down Palace Avenue in the direction of the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi to do a little Christmas ornament shopping. On the way there, we stopped to admire the sculptures outside the Worrell Gallery, one of a huge number of galleries in Santa Fe.
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| Worrell Art Gallery |
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| Christmas in Santa Fe, Ristras (Strands of Dried Chiles) |
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| Roadrunner and Quail, Christmas Gift from Rob and Dyce |
We stopped in the tiniest little storefront, Susan's, to add to our food-related Christmas ornaments for our tree. While we were in there, I spied a punched tin zia ornament in the photo below. You will recognize the zia as the symbol of New Mexico, from their flag and license plates. The zia belongs to and is a sacred symbol of the Zia Pueblo. The four sets of four rays represent the four directions, the four seasons, the four periods of each day (morning, noon, evening, and night), and the four seasons of life (childhood, youth, middle age, and old age).
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| Zia Ornament Echoes New Mexico License Plates |
Ornaments in hand, we walked back to the car to rest before dinner. I tried to grab some quasi-candid photos of the dynamic trio en route. Of course, whenever I would ask them to face me for a more formal photo, it was herding cats in trying to get them to all look at the camera and smile simultaneously.
On our way back to the house, Rob wanted us to see the Upaya Zen Center so we took a brief drive out Cerro Gordo Road. On the way, we passed a beautiful little stone chapel on a hilltop above a tiny grotto/shrine. La Capilla de San Ysidro Labrador is a small private chapel built in 1928 by Lorenzo López out of rocks from his property. Just down the street from the chapel, the Zen Center was closed for a private event so we could not see it.
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| La Capilla de San Ysidro Labrador on Hilltop |
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| Little Shrine Beneath the Capilla |
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| I Just Liked This Scene, so I Shot it |
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| Coyote Fence at Upaya Zen Center |
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| Fruit on a Tree Cholla, Cylindropuntia imbricata |
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| I'm a Sucker for Backlit Rabbitbrush |
Our little foray out Cerro Gordo done, we headed back to the house. While the guys rested for dinner, Ann read and I went on a little explore of the area around the house. When I am in a new place, I like to get outside and see what the local environment is like.
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| An Agave Outside the House |
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| More Rabbitbtrush |
The hillside on which the house sits is covered in equal parts Rocky Mountain Juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) and Piñon (Pinus edulis), the state tree of New Mexico. While walking through the scrub, I noticed that the Piñon Jays have not yet scavenged all the pine nuts, so I picked a few, shelled a few, ate a few, and gave Ann her first taste of a pine nut straight from the tree.
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| Piñon Cone with Seeds |
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| Pine Nuts With and Without Shell |
To cap off my day, I watched as the sun set opposite the Sangre de Cristo range to our east, bathing those mountains in a pink glow from which the name is supposedly derived. It was a beautiful finish to a fun day in Santa Fe.
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Sunset on the Sangre de Cristos
The Name is Derived from this Pink Coloration |
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