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Trip Dispatch #17, Saturday, June 4. Summit Road ranch to Embarcadero Creek Road: A Good Decision

The sky is sooty, we were told, because of forest fires in Arizona and near Trinidad, CO. I’d continued to have regrets about our not starting our trip in New Mexico, as originally planned. The smoky smell in the air made me realize that we’d inadvertently made the right decision. This morning we rode for a ways through ranch country, and then we turned onto Rte. 160. I walked around the roadside garbage, with Raudi in hand.

The highway seemed to be a geographical dividing line. After, we rode in drier and more open terrain. We ate lunch next to a bridge in a cottonwood grove that spanned the Rio Grande—the river was as I’d always pictured it, fast moving, brown-gray. In the afternoon, the San Juan Mountains came into view. Brown, humpy, like the bison we saw in the Alamosa Valley.

We will (for the first time this summer) sleep under the stars tonight.

Next: Dispatch #18: Maps versus GPS

Checking map of Rio Grande National Forest
Checking map of Rio Grande National Forest