I went up Zero Road East from the Pajarito Mountain Ski Area Lodge to the top of the Lone Spruce Lift to check out a hike I'll do with a group next week starting from Valle Canyon and going up to Pajarito Mountain along the Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP) fence line. This group doesn't want to trespass on VCNP property which is why we will skirt along the VCNP fence. That will work out good because the climb up Pajarito Mountain is shallower the further east you go. Going on the VCNP property forces you to go more west up a steeper ridge.
From the road on the south side of Pajarito Mountain, I went downhill a short distance to a meadow above Pajarito Canyon to take a few waypoints to plot on TOPO! so I could understand the lay of the land. Landmarks are Pajarito Canyon, the tower between Lone Spruce Lift and Aspen Lift (incidentally, TOPO! shows that the Pajarito Canyon Trail, which was destroyed in 2000 by the Cerro Grande Fire, ended in the vicinity of the hill which that tower sits on. I need to study the waypoints I plotted further so I have a good idea of how to go up from Valle Canyon and pop out at the right place on the backside of Pajarito Mountain.
Going back uphill in the meadow, I blundered across a faint trail that went along the edge of Pajarito Canyon over to the picnic deck at the top of Lone Spruce Lift. If we can blunder upon that again, that would be a nice way to go back to Zero Road East.
Aspens haven't started turning yet on Pajarito Mountain but down below there is a good display starting on the hillside south of Pajarito Canyon. Disappointingly, many of the small aspens on Pajarito Mountain won't change color this year as some disease or pest has turned the leaves brown and full of holes.
At the corner going downhill where Zero Road East makes a sharp hairpin turn to the east, I went down the Dogpatch bike trail to check it out as a possible shortcut back to the Lodge. It worked well except for one nastily steep downhill section. I saw a grouse on this section. Grouse look like small chickens and don't look anything like wild turkeys with their long, bobbing necks. Based on my experience today, I wouldn't mind just taking Zero Road East all the way back to the Lodge but I will defer to others who may know better shortcuts than the Dogpatch Bike Trail. If there is any precipitation, though, the jeep trail would be the safest.
The other major jeep road up Pajarito Mountain, the one on the left just uphill from the Townsite Lift, would put us too far to the east. Going down Zero Road East to the Lodge will work out nicely.