POTM...*: Islands in the Sky

(*Photo of the Month)

The Bible says that when Jesus Christ returns, those who believe or have believed will rise from the earth to ‘meet him in the air’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16-18). Frankly, I hope I get the chance to meet Jesus on top of one of these.

They’re called sky islands – small mountain ranges, or sometimes even singular mountains, that rise up out of the high, flat deserts of southwestern New Mexico, west Texas and southern Arizona. We were blessed to work with a wonderful church in Las Cruces, New Mexico earlier this year and last, and were introduced to them at that time. From any open promontory around the city, sky islands could be seen in nearly every direction; notice numerous of them in the distance in the photo above. (Click the photo and it will enlarge. Black Mountain is the one centered.) And so, hiking in our free time became a curious passion, and we enjoyed many excursions to their lofty, slightly cooler trail systems. Even in such an arid, desert environment, many of them had springs flowing all year at high elevation; the water was always a surprising delight to find, surrounded by an oasis of green and quickly disappearing into the sandy, granitic soil. We found ourselves musing upon the historical and natural drama that must have taken place at that spot over the years.

Florida Mountains, from Las Cruces, 60 miles distant

One of the most curious things about desert sky islands is that their upper habitat differs so markedly from their base that it can host plants or creatures typically found hundreds and hundreds of miles further north. Ascend some of them, and one can move from creosote and mesquite scrubland to grassland to pine forest and finally to conifer/aspen woodland all within a three-mile trek or less. Additionally, some sky islands can even have species completely unique to that range, maybe even found nowhere else on earth, just as happened in places like Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand, or other smaller isolated habitats like Hawai’i and the Galápagos. It’s what biologists call endemism or speciation. In this way, sky islands may more accurately be referred to as habitat islands.

Potrillo Mountains

Some are volcanic in origin, others the eroded remnant of earlier and vaster ranges. Some have produced minerals by ancient or modern mining efforts, and others have been void of the same. Some were used as hideaways for native tribes seeking refuge or hideouts for desperados escaping capture, others have hardly had foot stepped on them in their history. Or at least not human foot. One just northwest of Las Cruces contains one of the largest discoveries of in situ prehistoric animal tracks in the world, a place called Prehistoric Trackways National Monument, in process itself of being incorporated into the newly established Organ Mountains -Desert Peaks National Monument.

Here’s an effect I think is quite cool, though, and I remember first seeing it while traveling Interstate 80 in Utah between San Francisco and Chicago. If you’re hiking or driving in the flat desert, and your weather and perspective are such that heat mirages appear between you and the sky island, the range seems to float above ground as in some Tolkien fantasy.

Over our time serving the Las Cruces church, I had occasion to write several blogposts on experiences hiking in sky island ranges, among them June 14 2014 and March 27 2015; if you’d like, click on the bolded dates to take you to a couple of them. (In case you’ve forgotten or never knew, everything bolded in these paragraphs and appearing in blue font is a link to another place of possible interest.) The photo to the right is from the top of the sky island nearest Las Cruces, Picacho Peak, just west of town; in the photo, the range in the distance is the Organ Mountains, lovely, and the city of Las Cruces lies in the Rio Grande Valley between.

~~ RGM, November 5, 2015

POTM...*: A Little Lake with a Big View

(*Photo of the Month)

A week or two ago we posted a new cover photo on our Facebook page, and since several have asked about its location, I thought I might highlight it as this month’s POTM on my blog. I took it on a beautiful June day a couple years back. Before I share its whereabouts, though, I wonder if any of my Colorado friends recognize it… One big clue: RMNP.

By default, Facebook always crops photos people use as their cover so that they will fit their masthead. What that has done to my FB photo is make it seem panoramic, which also ends up emphasizing its mirror image. One friend even told me she looked at it upside down to see if she could tell the difference of which side was up! But as you can see from the complete snapshot above, the broader view opens up the mirror effect somewhat. Click the photo for a larger image.

There is something quite lovely about mirror images in water. Gail and I have loved finding locations for them, on certain trips getting up in predawn hours just to be able to catch them at sunrise over still surfaces, even over beaver ponds. Interestingly, reflection sometimes changes a landscape’s color, or the very image itself, by reflecting wavelengths differently than the way our eyes see them. For example, we have photos that reflect clouds in water very differently than how we see them directly with our eyes, reflecting some we cannot even see! This photo is pretty accurate – the differences you see in the lake’s foreground are actually underwater rocks.

OK, this one’s location? It didn’t even require a hike, one of those amazing photos that can almost be taken from a car window (though we didn’t)! Rocky Mountain National Park has four entry stations on its east side that are staffed by rangers at an entry booth.  The southernmost of these is the Wild Basin entrance off Highway 7, north of Allenspark, which leads to some of our favorite places to hike. Just inside the kiosk you will find this beautiful little tarn, Copeland Lake, adjacent to Copeland Moraine to its north (at right in the photo); I believe the mountain the lake reflects is Copeland Mountain. (If someone knows differently, correct me if I am wrong!)

Copeland Mountain is one of many ‘thirteeners’ in Rocky, and one of, believe it or not, over 600 in Colorado. A thirteener, for you lowlanders, is a mountain 13,000 feet or higher. Copeland is 13,167 feet, advancing well above treeline, which is about 11,500 feet at this latitude. But the crazy thing about Colorado is that it contains 54 of our nation’s 87 fourteeners, or 62%, and 637 of its 884 thirteeners, a whopping 72%! Alaska, of course, has the nation’s highest peaks, in fact the nation’s eleven highest, topping out at McKinley/Denali’s 20,328. California has the highest in the Lower 48, Mt. Whitney in the Sierras at 14,505. But it’s just the raw number of high peaks here that makes the place so amazing, and it is no wonder that one of the state’s nicknames is “The Highest State.” It has by far the highest average statewide elevation (about 6800 feet), as well as the highest low point (3,317 feet). So, contrary to what you might first think, the nickname has nothing to do with the legalization of a certain green herb here last year, nor of the fact that one of our official state songs is Rocky Mountain High by John Denver!

Many people here make it a goal to climb all the fourteeners, and some even all the thirteeners! We have only climbed one of these so far, Mt. Bierstadt at 14,065 feet, the photography of which I featured in last week’s blog.

Anyway, one of the things we love about this place is Rocky Mountain National Park, a must see if you visit Colorado. It never ceases to inspire us. Come, and we’ll be glad to take you there!

I lift my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. (Psalm 121:1-2)

~~RGM, May 12, 2013

P.S. And in the "Useless Piece of Information" category, did you know that of the 637 thirteeners in Colorado, five of them are named Grizzly Peak? Not only does that show an embarrassing lack of creativity among namers, but there aren't even any grizzlies IN Colorado...