Bridge Ices Before Road

I had the latest, but not the last, of my 2024 adventures last weekend, when I went off to New Mexico to see the annular solar eclipse (the title of the post comes from a pithy road sign I saw in multiple locations across the state). After all the delays during my previous flights, I had been nervous about needing two flights to get to Albuquerque, but in fact everything went completely smoothly from beginning to end.

My initial thought, when I had read about the eclipse, had been to go to Taos, where a friend now lives, and see it there; then I discovered that the ring of fire would not be complete there, so I looked for an Airbnb near Albuquerque, and found a tipi. Of course I wanted to stay in a tipi for a night! My friend had hoped to come and join me to watch it, but had other commitments. so I rented a car at the airport and made my own way there, arriving as darkness fell after watching the sun set across the mountains and plains.

In the near-freezing morning I had to drive to the next town to get coffee, but after that settled in with the other people who were at the site and watched the miraculous event happening. Unlike the previous total eclipse I had seen, in 1999 (I will tell the story of that, and share more pictures from the trip, on Patreon), it did not get dark, but it did get notably colder, and the light had a different quality. Watching through the special glasses, we got to see the steady passage of the moon across the face of the sun, and I wondered, as I often do, how other civilisations had managed to understand such a phenomenon and calculate when they would happen.

When it was over I drove up for lunch in Santa Fe – which was busy, as the airport had been, with people in the state for the balloon festival – and then onto Taos, and a warm afternoon at my friend’s adobe casita. I was taken for some filling New Mexican meals, and got to spend a little time on Sunday morning at the historic pueblo, an amazingly auspicious location, before driving back along the mountains and gorges (I had no idea the Rio Grande passed through the area) to Albuquerque and the flight home – where we tracked the sunset for a couple of hours. If I had been in a window seat, I would have taken a few dozen more pictures to add to those I had already taken of the dazzling clear mountain light. It felt like an incredibly rich forty-eight hours.