After our foray into downtown Santa Fe last evening, I was up on Saturday morning by 8:00, just a few minutes after sunrise. I was looking forward to today which was to include a trip to Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, NM followed by Rob's birthday celebration at The Pink Adobe in Santa Fe. I will never forget the date of Rob's birthday; he was born on Pearl Harbor Day.
After coffee at home and a leisurely start to our day after a late night the evening before, we needed to get moving to be able to have brunch and get to Ghost Ranch, a 75-minute drive northwest from Santa Fe. I'm uncertain how we decided to go back to La Choza for brunch, but I wasn't complaining after having had a wonderful dinner there on Thursday night. We arrived about 10:50 and waited in the lobby for a table when they opened at 11:00.
Once we were seated, we got an enthusiastic greeting from our server whom Rob and Dyce knew from their time as regulars at the restaurant when they lived in Santa Fe. Today, I had more time to examine the menu and spied blue corn burritos. Had I seen them on Thursday night, I would certainly have ordered them in preference to the burrito made with a flour tortilla. In addition to being Team Green in the chile world, I am also Team Corn in the tortilla department.
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| Blue Corn Burritos with Green Chile The Best Dish I Had in New Mexico |
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| Dyce's Chicken Adovada Quesadilla The Chicken Adovada was Delicious |
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| Sopaipillas, Classic New Mexican Dessert |
We were discussing with our server on one of her table visits how delightfully spicy the chile is, especially the green chile. She responded with, “The green has an opinion!” Absolutely it did! My experience in growing chiles tells me that the hotter and drier the weather, the spicier the chiles. I might be wrong, but I hold that growing chiles is just like growing most fruits; the more the plant struggles, the smaller quantity of fruit, but the better its flavor.
After our necessarily brief but wonderful lunch at La Choza, we set out north on US84 up the Rio Grande Valley. We ultimately crossed that famous river at the town of Espanola, where I saw many bare scarlet twigs of Red Osier Dogwood decorating its banks, bringing beautiful color to the river just in time for the holidays. Just a bit further north in the town of San Jose in the middle of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, we bent northwest along the Rio Chama where it joins the Rio Grande.
Following the Rio Chama, a few minutes later, we found ourselves in the town of Abiquiu (rhymes with barbecue) and found the highway situated above and alongside the Abiquiu Reservoir on the Chama. By this point, the geography had changed. Gone were the flats with the piñon-clad rolling hills; here were highly eroded buttes and other interesting formations. I really admired the Badlands-esque formations of rich red soil interlaced with layers of white or gray volcanic ash. Just beyond the town, we turned into the dirt entrance road into Ghost Ranch, about 15 minutes before we were to take a tour of the property with one of the guides.
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| Roadside Scenery Near Ghost Ranch |
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| The White Stripes are Layers of Volcanic Ash |
After stopping near the ranch entrance to view the small log cabin off to the right, Curley's Cabin of "City Slickers" fame, we headed further into the ranch and parked in front of the compound that houses the Welcome Center and two museums. After checking in at the front desk and being told that we would meet our guide at the bus parked in front of the anthropology museum, we wandered about the Welcome Center a bit.
The Welcome Center has a large collection of movie memorabilia from all the films that have been shot here; using the ranch as a movie location must be a good business. Some of my favorite films with scenes shot here are "No Country for Old Men," "3:10 to Yuma," and "City Slickers." That's a crazy mix of Coen-nutso, Eastwood-western, and Crystal-comedic films!
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| Curley's Cabin from Movie "City Slickers" |
But it was not movies that brought us to the ranch. Ghost Ranch is where famed artist Georgia O'Keeffe lived and painted at various points in her extraordinarily long life. The tour that Rob and Dyce had arranged was with a guide who would show us some of the formations around the ranch that have been memorialized in O'Keefe's landscape paintings.
While waiting for all the members of our tour group to assemble, we spent a few minutes walking around the anthropology museum.
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| Dead Leaves on a Fremont Cottonwood Outside the Museum |
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| Viga and Latilla Ceiling Detail |
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| Detail of an Exquisite Pot in the Museum |
After about five minutes in the museum, we joined our group outside. Our guide was wonderful and gave us a heartfelt tour of the countryside that she clearly loves, stopping every so often to show us a feature in the landscape along with a copy of that feature in a painting. One thing that really struck me is that some of the features that appear so large in the paintings are actually very tiny details that O'Keeffe picked out of the vast landscape.
Following are some few of the photos that I took in the harsh light of the afternoon. I have seen so many photos of Ghost Ranch whose colors have been doctored to enhance the look of the rock formations. These colors are as we observed them.
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| O'Keeffe's Beloved Cerro Pedernal, "Flint Hill" |
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| Say's Phoebe on Coyote Fence at O'Keeffe House |
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| I Love This Landscape |
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| Cerro Pedernal Through Coyote Fence |
Viewed in the harsh light of the afternoon or in the warm tones of sunrise and sunset, I love the colors of this landscape. If you’re a desert person as am I, you will find beauty as O'Keeffe did in the browns and sages, the terra cottas and ochers, the muted color spectrum of the earth. Ann and I appreciate the austere beauty of these landscapes that some might call barren.
While we understand that not everyone will love the New Mexico landscape, it speaks to us. We could become blasé about the desert landscape, living as we do in the high desert, but it does not seem likely. This trip to Ghost Ranch was a fantastic reminder of how beautiful these landscapes are. It is also a great reminder that while the high desert of Oregon is different from New Mexico, we are fortunate to live there. And fortunate to be able to visit New Mexico.
I loved our tour, but if there were a downside, it was that we had to remain on the road. I am sympathetic to trying to keep the landscape from being loved to death. On the other hand, I love to immerse myself in a landscape and understand it at a more intimate level. Walking a landscape is a different experience to viewing it from a road.
Flash forward to the house in Santa Fe. When I was changing for dinner, I noticed that the painting on the wall facing our bed was an O’Keeffe, a view of a hill that I had photographed earlier in the afternoon. I don't know how coincidental this really was, but I found it so. I photographed the conical hill partly because of its shape, but more so because I was attracted to the trees clinging lopsidedly to the side of the hill. I was not aware that it featured in a painting until I saw it hanging on the wall back in Santa Fe.
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| Conical Hill with Trees, Subject of an O'Keeffe Painting |
I was sitting with my back to the wall where I could contemplate the two aquamarine Dale Chihuly chandeliers hanging from the tall ceiling. I have always admired Chihuly's blown glass sculptures that fuse two disparate art forms, sculpture and glassblowing, into a new form. Although Chihuly is a Pacific Northwester, it seems somehow fitting to have examples of his work in Santa Fe, a town of many artists and works of art. His glass is not of the southwestern vernacular, but it somehow works for me especially as a flowing organic form contrasting with the angular Pueblo interior of the bar.
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| Twin Chihuly Chandeliers in the Dragon Room |
Unfortunately, our table was adjacent to small group playing Brazilian jazz tunes. Their music, while suitably mellow, was amplified in a small space that needed no amplification, the result being that we could not hear each other. When Jean-Marc and Mary entered and we introduced ourselves, Rob went next door to the restaurant to see if we could be seated early so that we could hear ourselves think. Our table was sitting open and we moved there.
Although the Pink Adobe has a fairly standard American menu, I had already decided that when possible, to stick with more traditional New Mexican foods during my short stay in the state. Accordingly I ordered the Plato Mexicano: a chile relleno, a blue corn enchilada, and what was called carne asada, but turned out to be a small steak. I had hoped that the carne asada might be a bit of crispy skirt steak bits rather than a more American grilled steak, but the steak was well cooked.
The server asked me for the usual choice of red, green, or Christmas, but there was no chile on my plate. I asked the server for it and she brought both sauces to the table. Both were good and spicy, but they don’t hold a candle to the chile from La Choza. This isn't a knock on the Pink Adobe; it is a compliment to La Choza. On the other hand, the chile relleno was the best we tasted in Santa Fe.
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| Plato Mexicano: Relleno, Enchilada, Carne Asada |
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| Churros for Dessert Quite Toughly Bready and not Ethereally Light |
Speaking of which, we all went back to the house for a nightcap and more conversation before Jean-Marc and Mary headed home and we headed to bed.
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