We set our sights on Cerro Pedernal, the object of innumerable photos and paintings and musings ("It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it." Georgia O'Keeffe).

An intense storm cell hit just as I got in the van coming home from errands... gusty winds and little pellets of snow at first, then hail (fortunately not large) -- this photo is from Camino la Tierra, all the white stuff is hail!

We hiked up to a local peak last week when the weather was unseasonably warm and gorgeous; Otowi peak is only a dozen miles or so from our house, next to the Rio Grande. We drove out to the trailhead, and hiked up a wash to where a very skinny and steep goat track heads up the edge of the mesa, thence across the flat mesa-top to another scramble up the remnants of the lava cone that is Otowi.