Sunset on Mesa south of Chaco Canyon New Mexico

2007-12-30 Chaco Canyon New Mexico 7255 light, originally uploaded by rauldiaz.

Everyone has a favorite set of photographs that captured a scene especially well. For me, this is one of those photographs. My brother and I had just spent a long day exploring and photographing the amazing Chaco Culture National Historical Park (I will post some photos of the Chaco Canyon and its beautiful ruins in another post).

We left the park in the late afternoon on a cold, crisp winter day to head back to Albuquerque. As we drove out of the park via its seldom used southern entrance (it's not used as much because it's a dirt road and you normally need a 4-wheel drive to navigate it, but the cold, dry weather made the road fairly easy to manage), we took a county road towards Interstate 40.

We were truly in the middle of nowhere. As we took one of the few curves of this county road, I looked to my left and noticed the mesa lit by winter sunset. I pulled over although there were no other cars on the road and we proceeded to photograph the glorious light reflected off the snowy mesa.

On the upper right in the far background, you can just make out Mt. Taylor in central New Mexico. This tall but lonely peak is revered as a holy place by the Indians of the many pueblos descended from the Anasazi who inhabited the enormous buildings and villages in the Chaco Canyon around 1,000AD.

This place should have a name. Using Google Earth, I located the exact place where I took this photograph. Although there is more than a good chance that I made a mistake, I think that this mesa is called "La Mesa de las Vacas" (the mesa of the cows), or, at least, that what the map says.

It's not a romantic name for such a special place.

Enjoy!
Radzfoto