sunsets santa fe

Light orange against a dark outline of the Jemez Mountains, momentary pink above that and then gone, you've got to pay attention, things change fast out here in the desert. i always have extra clothes in my truck in case i break down at night. cellphones work some places, and then they don't. you need an ice scraper and a flashlight and a good pair of sturdy boots that can take the cold and wet. the snow lays all over the hills like a white woman soft and feminine and deadly cold, crimson earth surrounds her beauty, the dirt roads a deep brown red and the highways are redder from something they put down for snow. the whole valley, we sit on the top of a hill, with a long stretch of dirt road to the top, which becomes impassable in a big snow, lays out beyond us, dotted with adobe homes of all sizes and manner. one long lonely highway lays at the bottom of our hill and we see headlights from cars slowly make their way up the pass. on a good night in the summer the whole sky is ablaze with reds , purple, golds, that stretch all the way from Santa Fe down into the Galisteo basin. a good sunset can last for a half and hour or longer, each night topping the other for effects until you think one cant be any more beautiful than another, until a more grander, more magnificent sunset shows up the next night. jgk