<div dir="ltr">BF<div style>I'm in Chama until Thursday morning. Did you hike an out and back? Where'd you start?</div><div style><br></div><div style>Thanks</div><div style>JD</div></div><div class="gmail_extra">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 11:54 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:blisterfree@yahoo.com" target="_blank">blisterfree@yahoo.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" style="font:inherit">This is a big deal. Stretching from the western Carson National Forest district / CDT country to the eastern district near Taos at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos, the newly-created Rio Grande del Norte National Monument protects a long tract of the Rio Grande Gorge along with a huge swath of nearly virgin high desert country that nonetheless had been a mixture of public and private lands with no overarching management plan.<br>
<br>I hiked a cross section of this territory last summer, from Chama to Questa, and can confirm it's as wild as something right out of the Pleistocene in many places, a remarkable thing considering the mostly uncomplicated high desert topography which spreads out between two distant, yet well-travelled highways at either end, and dotted with hulking, symmetrical cones born of recent volcanism. The views are sweeping and nearly
infinite.<br><br>Somewhere down the line, this new national monument will surely become a long-distance hikers best friend, I suspect. Let's see to it that it's managed well, is left in a natural state, and does not, as a now singularly managed tract, fall prey to politics, energy development, and the like.<br>
<br>- blisterfree<br><br>Sent from Yahoo! Mail for iPhone</td></tr></tbody></table><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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