the wild hare

is it wild hair or is it wild hare?  anyway, one day we all got ourselves a wild hair to take a camping trip.  i'm going to venture a guess and say it was july 4th weekend of 1989.  emily had just completed her english degree, and decided to go get another degree in computer science while she was at it.  it was there in the dingy computer lab where she met brent, her partner in crime on most occasions.  emily and i shared an apartment on gold street, in the mining ore street district of albuquerque.  there was silver street, copper street and the infamous one-ways lead and coal.  lead went west or downhill and coal went east or uphill - everyone remembered it by saying "lead sinks, coal rises".  gold street was one block south of the main thoroughfare central avenue, or the old route 66.  and on the other side of central avenue stood the campus of the university of new mexico and conveniently, the computer science building.  because brent and emily spent so much time in the lab it was easy when hungry to just walk on over to the gold street apartment to grab something to eat.  being poor students, and i, a poor working slouch, we had a lot of pasta in the cupboard.  emily liked to stock up on a brand called "creamette" pasta.  and that's what she and brent would eat day after day.  creamettes.  (i don't eat pasta).  i would watch them eat it.
boy could they shovel it in. 
anyway, one day we got to talkin' in between shovels of creamette, and decided to take a camping trip.
i think i made some homemade chicken curry salad sandwiches for the road.  and we planned out other goodies to eat...we didn't have to pack too lightly since the hike we would take would only be a couple of miles.  so of course we would bring that little red and white playmate cooler with half n'half for the coffee and some other stuff that needed to stay cold.  and also a bottle of wine and other treats a normal backpacker would not take. 
emily had a copper-colored toyota with a stick shift.  so anytime we went on a trip i couldn't help with the driving.  fortunately this trip was only about 2 to 3 hours (depending on summer tourist traffic) north to the taos ski area of new mexico.  we loaded up the car and hit the road.  we blabbed non-stop about brent's adventures in the peace corps in honduras.  it was fun, because emily and brent were fluent in spanish and i liked to pretend that i was also fluent.  so sometimes we would speak spanish and sometimes english, but all in all we mostly spoke goofy.
we drove through the town of taos, past the old indian pueblo until we made a right-hand turn towards the taos ski valley.  we drove past the hippy youth hostel called the "abominable snowman" (new mexico was settled by anglos, indians, mexicans, and hippies - the population is now 50% hippy - with a 5-10% new-age splinter group) and up into the ski resort area.  once you get to the ski resort you follow the road until it just about ends and you can see a large parking lot and an old avalanche scar going up the hillside.  we debated about leaving the car like that.  someone might try to steal it or damage it while we were gone.  such is life in new mexico.  you parks your car and you takes your chances.  so we left the little copper car and started our hike.  brent carried the little playmate, or maybe we took turns.  our packs were overloaded with food and gear.  it was all uphill to williams lake.  but uphill we climbed, stopping once in awhile to admire a view or to catch our breath.
by the time we got to the alpine meadow with the lake it had started to rain and we donned the large plastic ponchos which cover both hiker and backpack.  end of summer is the monsoon season in the high desert of new mexico, and afternoon rains always blow in off the plains.  you can watch them coming for miles and it's always so beautiful.  but on your favorite camping trip you don't really want too much rain.  but it was lovely, the rocky hillsides were graced by wild blue columbine.  large, zesty flower blooms blowin' in the wind and bowing from the rains.  the air was so fresh and bracing and after a short while the rain stopped.  we hiked to the far end of the valley where the day hikers couldn't be bothered to reach us.  there we set up the tent and found some patches of snow still lingering under the pines.  this was great - we could keep our foodstuffs chilled permanently using the never ending snow supply. 
i built a little house out of sticks from the ground, a place where elves could live.  i gave them a little campsite and a small firewood supply.  i made for them some paths lined with pebbles. (emily took a photograph of the little house and i have it somewhere.  tomorrow when i'm not too lazy i might post it here.  we'll see.
first i have to find it.)
after we unpacked our backpacks i'm sure we had some lunch and coffee.  there is a type of squirrel which lives among campsites and they call him the "camp robber", because he is not afraid of people.  we had our own resident squirrel.  he came right up to us and ate the crumbs of fallen sandwiches from under the rocks where we sat. a very entertaining fellow and a mystery to us all, until we returned to civilization and were able to research this type of squirrel.  i had to look it up in books, because google hadn't been invented yet.  i may have asked mama bear about it, because she was our camp director when emily and i worked at the girl scout camp.  she knew a lot about camping lore and animals. 

to be continued

Source: http://mulchhollow.blogspot.com/2010/08/wild-hare.html