On Tuesday I drove southeastward to get a view of the east facing slopes of the Manzano mountains where the Trigo wildfire continues to burn. With my telephoto lens zoomed in all the way to 300mm, the image above shows a helicopter preparing to drop fire retardant. As of this writing, the fire is still believed to only be about 40% contained, and it has left a burn scar approaching the 5,000 acre mark.

Winds were quite calm on Tuesday, but breezes unfortunately resumed today (Wednesday). Last night the winds actually took on a light southeasterly component and carried a potent and eerie stench of smoke into Albuquerque.

Fortunately the area near the fire is sparsely populated, and hopefully progress in the fire fighting effort will continue over the next couple of days. Click on any of the images or click here to see all the photos I took Tuesday afternoon.

A massive wildfire, dubbed the “Trigo Fire”, has spread into the Manzano mountains southeast of Albuquerque, and fire crews are still struggling to gain control over it. It ignited on the western slopes of the mountains on Tuesday the 15th, and is estimated to have burned upwards of 3,400 acres as of today (Monday afternoon). The image above was shot on Sunday afternoon from the Albuquerque National Weather Service (NWS) office while winds were gusting up to 35mph and the relative humidity had bottomed out around 4 percent. Notice the vertical extent of the large plume of smoke extending high off of the peaks, showing just how unstable conditions were on Sunday. Needless to say, the ABQ NWS office has issued Red Flag Warnings for much of the past several days given the strong winds and low humidities. Our Incident Meteorologist (IMET) was also dispatched to the fire last Wednesday to offer 24 hour weather support to fire management officials working at the fire. The next three images below were also taken Sunday afternoon.

The photo below was taken today, Monday the 21st. It shows isolated, smaller portions burning on the western slopes, while the main portion of the fire has already overtaken to the eastern side of the mountain chain. Winds were much lighter today, and the smoke plume was noticeably smaller…hopefully indicating some containment.

As I stated in my previous post, the first stop on my March 7th day trip was at the Valley of Fires, but from there I headed southward to White Sands National Monument.

I thought it was really worth the trip, and I enjoyed the photo ops…some of which were very challenging to capture on film. As the name implies the sand is…well white! It’s made up of gypsum I believe, and the sand has a highly reflective characteristic to it which can fool your camera meter into underexposing the sand. When the sand is underexposed it appears as a gray to almost brown color, as you will see from the picture below.

This shot looks otherworldly, but I still like the result even if it doesn’t represent the true “whiteness” of the sand dunes. You can see the rest of the shots I took here, some of which accurately show the “whiteness” of the sand. Again, I had this slide film scanned in by a photo lab and I didn’t remove any of the dust or artifacts gained by the scans.

Back on March 7th, I went to the Valley of Fires recreation area in the Tularosa Basin of south central New Mexico. The Malpais lava flow stretches across the recreation area here where lava blankets the lower elevations of the basin and stretches southward for miles. You can see it on satellite imagery, including the google earth image below.

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It reminded me of the island of Hawaii, only without the nearby ocean…that and the yucca plants and prickly pear cactus.

I have a few more images that can be seen here. You can see Carrizo Mountain in the background of some of the images. After stopping in the Valley of Fires I continued southward to White Sands National Monument. I am still in the process of uploading those pictures, and I hope to have a post later in the week with links to them.

Our house that we purchased last June has been a constant work in progress. Most of our money and most of our free time has been sucked into a seemingly endless home improvement pit (kind of like The Money Pit with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long…no it’s not that bad!) that Margie and I have been undergoing over the past few months. I think we have acquired a VIP customer status with Lowe’s and Home Depot, as I have lost track of the thousands of dollars that we have generously spent to these two addictive entities. However, we are finally starting to see some fruits of our labors after many hours of blood, sweat, tears, and questioning such as “what the heck did we get ourselves into?” We are essentially finished working on the two guest bedrooms and the office, with most of the improvements coming in the form of fresh paint, new ceiling fans, new closet doors, new hardware for the interior doors, and most recently carpet. As we expected, the carpet was a great finishing touch that brought it all together.

Here’s a before and after shot of one of the bedrooms (a.k.a. the red room). The view of the pictures isn’t quite at the same angle, but you get the idea. This room was a bear! It had layers of wallpaper that had to be removed before we could paint (as visible by the brown patches in the photo), and the carpet was certainly showing some age, abuse, and neglect. Click on one of the images to see more photos of before and after.

We are quite pleased with the results, especially since we are rookies at this home improvement stuff. We just wish it wasn’t so exhausting and costly, but in the end I’m sure it’ll be worth it. It’s just hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel…we have a long ways to go to finish the remainder of the house. The master bedroom is next on the list for reconstructive surgery.