New Mexico | Eating| Writing | Hiking | Cooking | Living

New Mexico is a special place. We have the sky, bigger than any other place’s sky, usually with clouds upon clouds to the horizon. We have the landscape — desert, mountain, high plains, prairie, rugged canyons — pretty much everything but the beach. Well, we have lots of White Sands, but no ocean.

We have lots of open space, because we have few people. The entire state of New Mexico has about 1/4 the population of New York City.

We have sun, snow, rain (sometimes), and wind. Boy, do we have wind.

We have things like the Balloon Fiesta, a booming film industry, the Isotopes, and tons of casinos to keep us all busy. We have hiking, biking, skiing, fishing, hunting, running, and sightseeing pretty much all over the place, including a handful of national forests and even more national parks. Although we have little water, we have gorgeous rivers, like the San Juan, the Pecos, the Gila, and the Rio Grande.

We have history — Clovis Man, Mammoths, fossils and arrowheads everywhere. We have the cave dwellings at Bandelier and Chaco Canyon, and the petroglyphs at, well… at Petroglyphs.

We have art. Santa Fe, Canyon Road, Taos, Madrid, Silver City, Las Cruces. Everywhere you go, there is art. We have Georgia O’Keefe and Cormac McCarthy. We have George R R Martin, for crying out loud.

We also have some things we don’t like to brag about. In the past two weeks I have encountered a tarantula, a rattlesnake, and a centipede right here at home. We have some problems with public schools, education, public health, and alcoholism. We have the SpacePort, and a pretty crappy mass transit system. We have lots of potholes and that lady who sued McDonald’s for her coffee being hot. We’re not perfect, is what I’m saying.

But what I think we ALL can agree on is the food. The FOOD MY GOD THE FOOD. The green chile cheeseburgers. The combo plates. The sopaipillas. The breakfast burritos, rellenos, tamales out of some lady’s cooler, biscochitos at Christmas, pinwheels at a pot luck, and fry bread from a roadside stand.

And, of course, the chips & salsa.

What we want to do with this blog is bring you a little inside info on some of this stuff, like how hard this hike was, or how carsick we got on that windy road, or whether or not we could hear the Taos Hum.

And of course, what we thought about the chips & salsa.