Blind Spots

or Getting Back to Nature

Some days just don't go according to plan.

"Closed:  For the purpose of minimizing the potential of a dangerous bear/human encounter.   Numerous bears are in the area feeding on the abundant acorn crop."

There's something compelling about bears.  With a little extra vacation time this year, I've been taking advantage of long weekends all summer to go rambling around in the Great (and sometimes Fair to Middling) Outdoors.  This week's destination was the Sulphur Canyon trail, a loop through what my books promised would be a "lushly forested" area of the Sandias.  The bears got there first, however, and arguing with bears, especially the hungry, grumpy ones with acorn fetishes, is something I mostly try to avoid.

Another trailhead a good, safe quarter mile up the road was still open.  I wasn't familiar with the trail and didn't know what to expect but decided at least to give it a shot.  I enjoyed it—loved it—although it wasn't an unmixed pleasure; but more about that in a minute.

The trail is called "La Cienega," a "wet meadow" in New Mexican Spanish.  Seasonal springs dot this area of the mountains, and the extra moisture fosters some truly lush growth, including alpine forests full of cool, dappled shade that feels just wonderful on a late summer day.  When you spend most of your outdoor time in the unbroken shade of your afternoon patio, the unbroken sunshine of the foothills, or the—I don't know what, slightly grazed?—sunshine among the cottonwoods along the bosque, you forget what it's like in a mountain forest.  The light—oh, the light:  soft and glowing with a cathedral brightness against a rich backdrop of shade.

Fleabane (Erigeron)

A different kind of fleabane

I say "forest" and know that I walked through one but in a way couldn't actually swear to it.  Probably there were trees.  I'm almost certain that there were.  Something, after all, had to have been casting all that lovely, dappled shade, and trees are likely to have been it.*   I was too enrapt looking at the wildflowers, though, to pay much attention to anything else.


From top to bottom, starting in the upper left (add an "I think" after all of them but the yarrow):  Some sort of four o'clock (Mirabilis etcetera); common yarrow (Achillea millefolium); MacDougal's Verbena (V. macdougalii); yellow salsify (Tragopogon dubius); pineywoods geranium (G. caespitosum); the same some sort of 4:00 as before; Canadian violet (Viola canadensis); towering Jacob's ladder (Polemonium foliosissimum) in blue and white versions; Whipple's penstemon (P. whippleanus); and cutleaf coneflower seeds and flowers (Rudbeckia laciniata)


Flowers had splashed everywhere, vibrant, lush, exhilarating.  Sunflowers, coneflowers, harebells, asters, geraniums—before I had even made it the few steps from the car to the trailhead, the camera was out and working.  Flowers, I pay attention to.  Trees, on the other hand... they're kind of a blind spot of mine.  I notice them in general but often don't pay much attention to them in particular.  If you asked me whether the forest trees were pines, aspens, or baobabs, I wouldn't know, not because I can't tell the difference, but because I really didn't see them. 

Not the live ones, that is.  The dead ones are a little different.  Only one jarring note sounded during this excursion:

but it sounded over

and over

and over.

Logging?  Forest management?  The internet mentioned logging in the 1950's, but I highly doubt these trees were felled as long ago as 60 years.  Still, it's been long enough for fungus to have grown on the logs, so "a number of years ago" would be my guess, but not many.

Back at home I looked in my books for information about the hiking trail but found no mention of the downed logs.  The blogs and other online resources—no mention.  Either it's such a normal feature of trails in the Sandias, or the path turns into pristine wilderness farther on, or the writers have focused only on guidepost-y landmarks, or they're so aware of all the good things—the raspy call of mountain chickadees, the shrieking of Steller's jays; the brisk, resiny smell of conifers and the sweet scent that only comes near fresh water; the trees (whatever they are) and abundant wildflowers—that the ugliness of waste is something they're blind to, at least in print.

That kind of blew me away—at first impression the detritus almost overwhelms the beauty of the flowers.  It's everywhere.  It looks like a mountainside of trees was clearcut and the unmillable logs abandoned.  But on my second visit, or third?  Maybe I'll learn to be blind to the wreckage, too.

I've found myself since then mulling over different kinds of blind spots:  "inattentional blindness"—the invisible gorilla that we overlook because our focus is elsewhere, as described by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons; blindness to things we haven't yet learned to notice and so don't have on our radar; and the clearcutting blindnesses we choose to suit our own purposes.

One day the land will recover from  and return to equilibrium.  But in the arid mountains, 7,000 feet above sea level, that will be a long, slow process.

La Cienega is getting back to nature—but it won't get there in my lifetime.

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* Flocks of considerate hummingbirds are so hard to come by these days.
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For the record, I know Dan Simons but am mentioning The Invisible Gorilla purely on its own merits; I haven't been paid—or even bribed with pizza (Dan's preferred medium of exchange).  (Do look at the experiment—it's fascinating.)

Editor's Note: Since publishing a more spluttery version of this post on the 22nd, I've come back and softened it a little.  Really, I don't know why I got so up in arms; the horse is long since out of the barn.

Editor's Note 2:  Baffled made a comment that has me rethinking my impressions.  I may have jumped to conclusions and have done some editing accordingly.  The upshot is, "I don't know what happened there but would sure like to find out."