The story of my recent backpack into
the Gila Wilderness in Southern NM
Last week, near the end of March, 2010, eight of us set out from the Visitor Center near the Gila Cliff Dwellings in Southen New Mexico for a five day backpack in the canyons and mesas on the east side of Middle Fork of the Gila River.
I was a little worried about keeping up with a bunch of nineteen year old kids who all looked like lean and fit high school athletes. So, when we hit the trail I tried hard to keep from falling behind. As it turned out, I did struggle a bit, but I quickly saw that I had a big advantage over the kids (as I soon began to call them) even though I was three times as old as most of them. The kids all showed up with huge packs full of all kinds of luxury food, fresh vegetables, tubs of butter, bags of fresh meat and heavy cooking utensils. Clearly they had never heard of Ultra Light Backpacking, or maybe they had heard of it, but were tough enough and young enough to care less about lightweight anything.
Read the entire article to see how all of this worked out.....
Read the entire article about the Gila Wilderness and see the pictures I took there.
Joan and I were potters for twenty-five years before we became photographers. In 1973 I was a graduate student in English and American literature working on my PhD and teaching at the University of New Mexico. Joan and I had two children and were well on our way to beginning a comfortable life of faculty parties and suburban life in some upscale university town. Then Joan discovered that she was very, very good at throwing pots and that the local galleries were dying to buy her work. So, having come of age in the 1960's, we chucked the university and started on a forty year odyssey of life on the great American art road. Here is the story of how we began.
Misadventures in the early days.
Not too long after Joan and I became potters, we bought three acres of land on the Rio Grande River in Corrales NM and began building a large adobe home. Since our only income was as potters we decided to do everything ourselves. And since we were city folks with not too much hands on experience in anything, all of this led to some pretty exciting misadventures.
