The High Desert Itself

Step out anywhere in New Mexico and the first thing you notice is the silence. Not absence of sound, but a particular quality of quiet, the kind that comes from open land stretching in every direction to a horizon ringed by mountains the color of dried blood and sage. You are standing in one of the most geologically ancient and topographically violent landscapes on the continent.

New Mexico spans nearly one hundred twenty-two thousand square miles. Its elevations run from about twenty-eight hundred feet at Red Bluff Reservoir on the Pecos River to over thirteen thousand one hundred feet on Wheeler Peak, in the Sangre de Cristo range above Taos. The name of that range, Sangre de Cristo, Blood of Christ, comes from the reddish alpenglow that lights the mountains at dusk, a phenomenon Spanish missionaries in the sixteen hundreds took as a sign.

The state sits at the convergence of four distinct landforms: the Rocky Mountains terminating their southern reach in the north; the Colorado Plateau stepping down through red-rock mesas in the northwest; the Chihuahuan Desert spreading north from Mexico across the south; and the southern Great Plains rolling in from Texas to the east. That convergence produces the biological richness that has drawn people here for at least thirteen thousand years, from the Paleo-Indian hunters of the last ice age forward. The Rio Grande bisects the state from north to south, a river that has fed every civilization this land has known.

The Pueblo peoples irrigated corn, beans, and squash along its banks long before European maps existed. The Spanish colonial road called the Camino Real followed it for almost two thousand miles. The river is still the spine of New Mexico's populated corridor, and in drought years it runs dry before it reaches the sea, a reminder of just how precarious life at this latitude has always been.