Jemez Mountains in New Mexico

Tuesday, September 30

By this time we had done about all we could as far as unpacking for our James & Jessica goes.  The kitchen and bathrooms were set up.  We decided to take a day trip for ourselves.  We drove into the Jemez Mountains up to the Valle Grande.  We had hoped to see the changing leaves on the Aspen trees.

As we were headed out of Los Alamos towards the Jemez Mountains we saw this antenna that is one of the radio antennas located throughout the US.

A lot of the rock around the Jemez Mountains is formed from the ash of the volcano that erupted in the Jemez.  The eruption left the "Valle Grande".  This is one of the unique formations we saw.

This view shows the road we followed to this point and the road going on.  Beautiful view!

We rounded a corner and this deer was on the side of the road.  I slowed and Tic took several pictures.  The deer was not bothered by us at all.  She just kept eating. 

More beautiful views.  Still looking for the aspen trees changing colors.

Well we finally got to the area where the aspen used to be.  There was a wildfire that came close to Los Alamos last year.  Obviously the fire burned more than we thought.  Sad view.

The forest should be thick similar to this, but full of aspen trees.  

We kept driving and came to the Valle Grande.  This picture does not really show the expansiveness of the valley the volcano created.  The burned trees in this picture were the aspen trees.    It seemed unusual to us that the pines trees were still growing and the aspen were burned.  

Here is more of the valley of the Valle Grande.

A little further down the road there is this sign about the Valle Grande.  The 2 pictures below are views from this sign.

This picture still does not show how far it is across the valley.  If you look closely about the middle of the picture, you can see a small piece of a road.  That gives a small prospective.

This is a ranch house off to one side of the valley.

To our delight this private ranch was now a national preserve and the public was invited to visit.

This is a panoramic of the valley Tic took from just past the above sign.  We are just inside the valley at this point.

As we were driving into the Valle Grande visitor center we saw this elk.  We took pictures and were excited to see such a sight.  As we got closer we realized it was fake.  It was a disappointment!!!  We learned at the visitor center that they had an elk education event the weekend before and set up the fake elk.  We laughed at ourselves for getting so excited.

This picture shows the cattle pens just across from the visitors center.  There are cattle running in the valley.  It was really neat to be able to drive into the valley.

Here is the only live wildlife we got to see--groundhogs.  Woopie!
When we left the valley we decided to head towards Jemez Springs.

Unfortunately all we saw was more wildfire damage.  So we turned around and headed back to Los Alamos.

We stopped at a small pullout to take this picture of Los Alamos .  The white buildings are part of Los Alamos.  While this picture is beautiful it still shows more devastation on the right side of the picture. We were surprised at the amount of devastation.