I went all the way up Bayo Canyon today, starting at the bottom of the Main Hill Road, walking 2 miles in on the sewer treatment plant dirt road and than 4 miles up snowy Bayo Canyon. It's a pretty canyon in the winter. The trunks of the tall ponderosas look so red against the white snow. The sky was a brilliant blue.
About 2 1/2 miles in from the Main Hill Road, the road I was following continued on but my passage was blocked by a locked gate and a fenced-in area. I obediently detoured around it on the Bayo Canyon Trail as a few other hikers had before me but the snow was deeper than on the road; so, I gave up and stepped over the top of the barbed wire fence to continue walking on the old road.
Bayo Canyon is fenced off here because there is an area of buried contaminants from radiolanthanum (RaLa) experiments during (?) and after WWII. It's been cleaned up several times in the past.
In my wisdom, I didn't wear my SnoSeal-ed hiking boots because I truly didn't believe I would go all the way up to the roundabout between North Mesa and Barranca Mesa. I was sure I would probably give up due to deep snow but it wasn't that deep on the road and there were footprints from other hikers that I could step in. My shoes and socks got wet but the day was warm and I kept moving. Other than two joggers and a dog that I saw when I started out, no one else was on the trail.
When I got up out of Bayo Canyon and onto the Bayo Bench Trail, it was well-trodden and even icy in spots. My two ski poles were invaluable!
The vampire movie Let Me In is being filmed in Los Alamos. They were supposed to be filming at the roundabout and pedestrian underpass this week (definitely not why I walked up Bayo Canyon!). I was afraid the filming would force me to detour around it but I didn't see any film personnel. However, as I walked into the pedestrian underpass, there was a cameraman at the other end shooting footage and I said "Oh, oh," because I was afraid I was messing up a movie scene but he said it was fine to walk through. I told him I had walked 6 miles and he seemed impressed!
I started walking around 11:45am and called spouse around 3pm so it didn't take that long. Obviously, snow conditions were decent for walking because I made fairly good time.
I called spouse to pick me up but he was busy at work so I walked to an Atomic City bus stop on Diamond Drive across from the golf course and waited. Two big buses passed me by but finally a tiny bus chock-full of middle school students picked me up. There were no seats and I guess I don't look frail enough to be offered one so I stood and braced myself during all the various stops and ingress and egress of passengers until we got to the transit center at the lab where I got off. I called spouse again and he was ready to leave to pick me and take my back to my car. I ate a snack while waiting for him.
I enjoyed today's adventure. Tomorrow, though, I will take a tame road walk.
No comments:
Post a Comment