La Luz Trail is La Winner!

When our new friends from Germany, Norbert and Rosi said that the La Luz trail in Albuquerque was one of their favorite hikes in the world, we definitely knew it would have to fit into our itinerary here.  This spring has been unusually wet here in the desert, but we finally found a day when the rain showers weren't supposed to start until late afternoon.  So we got to the trail head in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque early to start the hike.

The peak to the right of center with the radio towers on top would be the top of the La Luz trail.  But the advice we were given was to stop at the scenic view point 4.6 miles up, so that was our real destination when we started.

 The first couple miles of the trail is covered with high desert flora that we have seen many times.  But we were treated to peeks of peaks that were ahead.  This section has countless switchbacks that are the longest we have ever encountered.  We measured one swichback that was almost a quarter of a mile long.  So it took us a half mile of walking to gain only twenty feet in altitude at that point.  That means that the trail felt almost level at first, so it took us about an hour to reach some pretty rocks.

It was also interesting to see the city of Albuquerque nestled in the valley as we hiked higher into the Sandias.

We are now two hours into the hike, and understanding why this trail is so highly regarded.  It actually feels like a trail with multiple personalities, so it is never boring.  The rocks kept getting steeper and the desert landscape started changing into pine forest.












We love hiking in the mountains!  One of the reasons is we love watching those tiny distant peaks grow larger as we walk towards them until we are finally at eye level with their craggy summits.  We are now three hours into the hike and the most uttered word at this point is "Wow!"

We made it to the "Scenic View Point" and it was jaw-dropping beautiful!  We were standing on the mountains that we had been looking up to all morning, and now we could see over into the next group of peaks.  "Wow!"

We made it to the 4.6 mile scenic view point at 12:15, after hiking for a little more than 3 hours.  That was a leisurely pace because we were visiting with other hikers and enjoying the beautiful views.  There are a number of people that use this trail for their regular workouts.  One gentleman we talked to said he walked to the scenic view point 3 times each week.  He advised us to turn around here, as a 9.2 mile hike (with the return to the parking lot) is a demanding workout at this altitude.  Besides, Mark had just turned his ankle yesterday, so it was still sore.  We'd have to be crazy to continue further!

But we couldn't help ourselves, we just wanted to see down into that next canyon and around that next turn.  Above you will see Denisa's black jacket (with her inside it) about a third of the way from the bottom of the picture.  There's something about hiking amongst those giant pillars of stone that we love!

Our hiker friend had warned us that past the scenic view point, the trail changes dramatically.  It changes from a 6 degree incline to 10 degrees.  It's a higher altitude so there is less oxygen.  It is covered with areas of rip rap that are hard to traverse.  You can just see Denisa in the picture above peeking out from one of those areas of large rocks.  We would be crazy to continue!

 But the views were spectacular, and we are so glad we got to see this.  Above, Mark is resting in the rock section to the left, looking over the landscape that we had just hiked through.

It's 1:00 now, and it looks like we won't have any blue sky pictures today.  We're just hoping to get off the mountain before the predicted afternoon rain showers arrive.  But we keep going, loving the bright green of the new leaves on the aspen trees against the rocks.  There were a dozen times that we had to cross a field of rock boulders, but there was always a level break with a nice walk through the forest afterwards.  Have we mentioned that we loved this hike?

We were high enough that we started seeing snow by 1:30.  So of course there was a snow ball fight on the trail.  You can see the snowball in the air in the photo below.

It's hard to capture how big and beautiful the mountains are around us now.  That's why we usually try to have a person in the frame some place--just to get a sense of scale. Below is a panorama shot that Mark took to show the size of the boulders and the mountains with Denisa looking pretty small in the center.

The patches of snow on the trail got bigger as we got around 10,000 feet in elevation.  Since upper elevations got snow the day after our hike, there is even more snow on the Sandia mountains now.  We obviously have decided not to follow the advice we were given to turn back at 4.6 miles, but we are glad that we didn't miss the spectacular scenery we witnessed after that view point.

We arrived at this junction and had to make a decision.  At this point we are a half mile from the summit.  If we turn left, we can see the view from the top, but we will have to then turn around and hike the 7.5 miles back to the parking lot.  If we turn right, we can walk a mile on the crest to the tram station that will take us to the base in 4 minutes.  But then we would have to hike 3.6 miles back to where our car was parked.

We turned left and made it to the summit.  We even have the picture to prove it.  It's almost 3:00 and we're at the crest.

 Here's a view from the top that shows those rip raps sections that we had to zig zag across to get to the top.

Actually, we had just a little further to get to the Crest House--elevation 10,678 feet.  We had packed a picnic that we had already eaten, so we rewarded ourselves with a candy bar and cookie at the restaurant here.  It might seem curious to have a restaurant that only hardy hikers can get to.  But there is a road that travels the eastern side of the Sandia mountains that makes it easy for anyone to see the view from the top.

We also took a picture of Mark in front of those radio towers that are barely visible from the bottom.

As beautiful as this hike has been, there has been a veil of gloom in the area today.  We heard on the news last night that a 24-year-old woman had been missing for 5 days, and her car was found in that parking lot at the Crest House.  Search helicopters were in the air during most of the morning's hike.  They were just tiny specks in the sky at first, but as we hiked higher we could see them clearly.  Their blades make a thundering that echoes through the canyon. 

 
When we made the last turn for the last half mile to the top, we were met by "Butter," a friendly dog that jumped up on Denisa in greeting.  We found out that Butter was a search and rescue dog, trained to find missing persons.  Butter's trainer rewarded her for finding Denisa, and then she slipped a doggy treat for Denisa to reward Butter as well.

We met another search and rescue team at the summit, armed with very heavy backpacks filled with the ropes and apparatus necessary for high angle rescue.  They were one of 28 teams from all over New Mexico that were combing the summit area all day.

 When we got to the Crest House, we saw the Incident Command Center bus parked in the parking lot at the top.  This is the same parking lot where the young woman's car was found.

We left the summit at 3:30, keeping our eyes open for anything that might help the search.  We had hiked up leisurely in 6 hours, but we knew that we needed to make it down before dark and hopefully before the rains came in.  The skies were still cloudy, and the views still spectacular.  But we took only a few pictures on the descent.

We decided that this was one of our all-time favorite hikes because it had so much variety and such good views.  We also compared it to our hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up.  We hiked  17.5 miles in the Grand Canyon spread over two days.  This was a 15 mile hike in one day.  At the Grand Canyon, we started at 7,200 elevation and went down.  Today we started around 6,500 feet and went up 4,000 feet to 10,678.  We spent 12.5 hours on the trail during the two-day Grand Canyon hike.  Today, we would spend 9.5 hours hiking up and then back down.  We were obviously going pretty fast on our descent, as we got back to the parking lot in three hours, and it never did rain of us!

When we started hiking this morning, we didn't plan to hike 15 miles.  But some times God's wonders are too wonderful to miss!

P.S. We heard on the news that the body of the missing young woman was found two days later.  The last we knew, officials think that she fell accidentally off one of the rugged cliffs that we had just hiked by.