We returned to the Jemez mountains, to the same general vicinity just north of the Valle Caldera that we had camped over memorial day weekend earlier this summer. This time it was just the immediate family. We visited a spot that I knew about from running a SAR mission the previous year. We tucked ourselves up against the back of a meandering meadow and stayed put for a few days.
It rained and hailed on us but we remained snug and cozy under our canopy and in our tents. Fortunately the lightning stayed well away…
On the way in we had approached from the North, through Abiqui, but on the way out we checked out the western route along 144. I had heard that the road had been improved, and that was an understatement. Previously it was paved with extremely bumpy and slow, but it has been graded flat and fast now. I have mixed feelings about the improvements. This bit of the jemez used to be some of the most remote, because of how bad that section of road was. Now it will be much more accessible, people will be more willing to drive it, without having to put in the extra time and effort (and suffering) to either bump up the road or else drive all the way around. The improvements effectively turn this into an excellent cross-the-jemez driving route.
