The Rio Grande Gorge Bridge

In my last post I mentioned why I chose the stone I did for the pendant that I made.  It had a particular sentimental value to me.  Catherine Waterhouse mentioned that she would like to see the pictures, so here are a few.

 It was July 2009 the first time we drove out to Taos.  There are a lot of artists here and we thought it would be a good place to hang out for a couple of days.  I fell in love with this town.  Above is our hotel room.  I like the fact it is very "New Mexico".

 Someone told us that it was worth it to drive west of town to see the Rio Grande Gorge bridge.  In addition, the "earth ships" are only a mile or two further, but that's a story for another time.  Taos seems to have mountains everywhere, and a storm was coming over the mountains from the east.

Above was my first view of the bridge.  Near this spot there were a few vendors selling things.  There was this guy (some would call him a hippie) selling some cabochons, most of which he had cut himself.  I bought a few stones off of him, including the stone that I put in the pendant shown in my previous post.

I started out on the bridge, but it was really scary.  There was just this little railing and when you looked down it was SO far down!  Every time a truck would come by the whole bridge would shake.  It didn't feel very sturdy at all.  The wind was starting to pick up because the storm we had seen was getting close.  I snapped three pictures from the bridge and then turned around and went back.  I did not want to be on that bridge when the storm hit.

 At left is the view looking back towards the vendors and the storm.  You can see how close the storm was getting. 

Here is the view to the north as we left the gorge behind.  You can see some of Taos at the end of the rainbow!

As we got closer to Taos, the sun came out and we kept seeing a brilliant double rainbow.

And then we saw the other end of the rainbow.  If you look closely, you will see it's still a double.


I want to leave you with a shot that I took when we revisited the bridge on a nice day in 2012.  The bridge had been totally redone.  It no longer shook when vehicles went over it (confirms my suspicions it wasn't safe in 2009!) and they had added some bumpouts for pedestrians to stop and enjoy the views.  By the way, the guy I bought the stones from was married to a photographer who took a drop-dead gorgeous shot of the gorge from the bridge.  Last I knew it was being used by the Taos department of tourism.