We bought a great book, 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles of Albuquerque, and have been using it to find hikes that have decent shade and can be done in about 4 hours so that we can do them in the morning without melting in the afternoon sun and heat. Our first taste of the Sandia Mountains was on the Crest Trail, also referred to as "the mother road" because apparently almost all of the trails through the Sandias connect back to this route at some point. As you can imagine, the Crest Trail is quite long (the Sandias run about 17 miles N to S and 8 miles W to E), so on this day we only did about 5.5 miles of it. Hopefully sometime in the fall once the weather is more mild (and we've gotten stronger and more acclimated to hiking at 10,000 feet!), we'll be able to do a little backpacking along this route and get farther on the trail. In the meantime we are getting adjusted to the completely different terrain! It's very rocky and sandy with lots of short, squatty oak trees, cacti, and shrubby evergreens.
I keep trying to find a blooming cactus but I can only seem to find them when the flowers are dying, so this is the best shot I've gotten so far.
There were some great views along the way...
And we saw some crazy prehistoric looking toad-lizards (we still aren't sure what they really are)...
It was a great intro to the Cibola National Forest!
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