My Thanksgiving trip to New Mexico (10 images)

[texxter]

This Thanksgiving weekend we drove to New Mexico from Dallas and spent three days enjoying the beautiful natural beauty of the southern area of the state. Our route was:

1. Day 1 -Carlsbad Natural Caverns and drive to Alamorgordo.
2. Day 2 - White Sands National Monument in the morning and City of Rocks in the afternoon.
3. Day 3 - Gila Cliffs and The Catwalk near Glenwood. We spent the night in Socorro and drove home the next day.

Here is the route - you can click on the map below for a larger map:



Here are some monochrome images from our three days in southern New Mexico. I only took one camera and one lens, the D700 with the 24-70mm zoom. It turned out to be a bit heavy, but having a zoom was convenient. I left the tripod and flashes home.

#1. We got to Carlsbad Caves before they opened, so I took the camera and walked around the parking area looking for a photograph. I liked the simplicity of these vertical branches against the sky and the desert. The Chihuahua Desert is huge and dry... we saw many rivers and creeks completely dry this time of the year.



#2, #3, #4 - The Caverns are fantastic - we took the King's Palace guided tour and the self-guided tour. I didn't have a tripod, so I improvised the best I could to capture long exposures with ambient light only. The children really enjoyed the magic of being underground, and the beauty of the formations. I truly recommend this caverns, it's magnificent. You can see some of the folks that went in the guided tour sitting at the bottom right of the first frame.







#5 - White Sands National Monument is another great treat for children. They tumbled and rolled and had a grand time playing with the sand. This capture below shows the size of the dunes, with the car as a reference point.



#6, #7 - In the afternoon we drove to City of Rocks, north of Deming. It's a weird landscape of rocks shaped into colossal shapes by erosion. Again, another great place for children, as the climbed, jumped and hid in the city of rocks. This is a huge boulder in late afternoon light, and the second image is a general view of what the place looks like.





#8 - Gila Cliffs - this is another great place to take children to. The rangers went overboard giving them patches, pins and other goodies. My kids were delighted! Here is a view from inside one of the caves on the cliff of the mountain.



#9, #10 - After Gila we went to The Catwalk, a state park near Glenwood - fantastic rocks, a river going thru them, and cascades like this one. The place was almost empty and we spent a few hours just hiking and playing. The last image was as the end of the afternoon, with bright directional light hitting the branches of this tree.

[Ernst-Ulrich Schafer]

Fun stuff, TFS.

[venchka]

The photographs are great. When did you have time to breathe? That was quite a trip in a short time.

[Hanky]

Awesome! Thanks for sharring. My sister used to work at the Gila C. D. Park.

[texxter]

Thanks for your comments. Whenever I travel I regain my admiration for great landscape photographers - it's hard to do it well!

We only visited a couple of places each day, so the pace was not too bad. We drove quite a bit, but the children are used to it.

It was fun and therapeutic for me, as this is a busy time at work...leaving on a business trip early on Wed... New Mexico is a great place to unwind.

[jeffro20]

Nice images as always. My favs are #5 and #9. Thanks for sharing.

[L Stegall]

Love that first image of the branches against the sky. I'll bet 99% of the visitors to Carlsbad just walk right by and never even notice them, but it makes a very unique and beautiful take on the starkness of the area.

I've been to that City of Rocks as well too -a detour I took on my way to Las Cruces once on business - interesting spot.

I think it's always fun and very interesting to deliberately pick one body and one lens for a trip and really make yourself focus on seeing things through that one lens. Well done!

[davidlc]

Like your shots been to Calsbad several times and White Sands never been to Gila Cliffs. Thanks for sharing.

[texxter]

Thanks for the comments, Jeff, Lisa and David. As I examine these images and compare them with the color versions I realize that B&W landscapes is darn hard to do well. Converting a color image to b&w sometimes gives disappointing results as color tonal separation dissapears and masses of gray bump into each other. That's certainly true of images #6 and #7. Plenty of room to grow in this area for sure!

This week I am in Puerto Rico on a business trip with just a few hours to walk around and do some photography. Let's see what I come up with - this time it's the D700 with the 35mm f/2 lens and nothing else.

[tml]

Very nice series, Paco. Tri

[catfish]

Been to rock city and the Gila cliffs - and you're images capture the essence of each place - nicely done!