My first post on Santa Fe was on the first couple days we spent in town. Thematically, I didn’t see a neat way to divide up the remaining photos, so here is everything else, chronologically. The big event during our week there was the blizzard that hit Tuesday afternoon and paralyzed much of the city, so I decided that dividing the trip into ‘Before’ and ‘After’ snow was as good an editorial choice as any.
The title of this post is a bit hyperbolic, as the aforementioned “blizzard” left maybe three inches of snow on the ground. Santa Fe isn’t accustomed to much snow, however, and it showed. Businesses closed early, and streets started to empty in the afternoon. We, on the other hand, had rented a decent SUV and had plenty of experience driving in the snowy midwestern winters, so we set off to drive around and shoot the city in the snow.
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Below is the historic Santa Fe plaza in the center of town in twilight gloaming.
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It continued snowing, on and off, for next couple days, though without much accumulation. We drove out into the desert to see what we could find. I tried my hand at one of the great photography tropes of the American West: the lonesome straight road leading to the horizon.
Someone had an old caboose in their yard, and I thought it made for a nice shot in the snow.
I’d read about a funky little abandoned area in Ojo de Vaca, about an hour’s drive from town. Once the snow subsided I set out to get there. The drive took me first down a highway, then a secondary road, then a tight, winding two lane ribbon of asphalt, then, finally an unplowed dirt road. In places there were no fresh tire tracks in the snow, indicating I was the first to drive here in at last 48 hours. I was glad to have the SUV, as it handled well through the snow drifts, some of which were at least a foot deep.
Once there, I found a crumbling old pumping station and a lonesome little cemetery by the roadside. The snowy graves especially were a nice shoot, with the setting sun filtering through the brush behind them.
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On the drive back, I caught this nice vista. I’m sure it’s a view the local ranchers get to see on the regular, but for me, this combination of dramatic landscape and sky was hard to pass up.
The next couple days were fairly chill. Had a massage/spa day (hey, I was on vacation) and bummed around town. A famous landmark in Santa Fe is the Loretto chapel and its “miraculous” spiral staircase. I’m not an engineer, but it didn’t strike me as something requiring a higher power to build. It is, admittedly, an impressive piece of woodwoorking as well a fun thing to shoot.
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Toward the end of the week, we set out on a daytrip to Taos, a couple hours north. The main thing I wanted to see there was the Taos Pueblo, a millenium-old cluster of adobe homes just outside of town. It is inhabited to this day by Native Americans, but sadly it was closed to the public when we visited. So, instead, I’ll close this post with a few shots from the scenic byways around Taos and in the surrounding mountains.
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T A B U L A R A S A photography 