vallez caldera, and around ...

The ostensible aim, today, was to go to the Science Museum in Los Alamos - to look at the history and images of Big Flashes - in the form of the atomic bomb.  But there was very little on view that spoke to this - apart from a camera, and one of the thick lenses issued to observers so that they could look at the first atomic blast.  I would have loved the museum if I were 9 - lots of hands-on science - but we escaped to the farmers' market and the Los Alamos branch of El Parasol - and then (always on my agenda), to Valles Caldera, a National Park of extraordinary grasslands inside the rim of a very old volcano.  Here's a National Park attendant feeding a humming bird;

here's the bird itself coming in.

Here's the east branch of the Jemez river;

a rock squirrel that we saw on our hike;

here, the road up to Los Alamos,

and here, the road down through Jemez Springs.

All of it - northern New Mexico at its best.