Letterboxing~Fortune Teller

On Saturday I asked, Val of Fantastyk Voyage, if she would want to drive me to Tinkertown Museum so I could place a letterbox there that I'd created. Val, always up for an adventure, gladly agreed and we were on our way for the short drive up into the Sandia Mountains.

Tinkertown was created and built by Ross Ward and his wife Carla for more than 40 years. Ross's miniature wood-carved figures were first part of a traveling exhibit, driven to county fairs and carnivals in the 1960s and '70s. Today over 50,000 glass bottles form rambling walls that surround a 22-room museum. Wagon wheels, old fashioned store fronts, and wacky western memorabilia make Tinkertown's exterior as much as a museum as the wonders within. Inside, the magic of animation takes over. The inhabitants of a raucous little western town animate to hilarious life. Under the big top, diminutive circus performers challenge tigers and defy gravity while the Fat Lady fans herself and a polar bear teeters and totters.
Throughout, eccentric collections of Americana fill Tinkertown's winding hallways. Otto the one-man-band and Esmerelda, the Fortune Teller, need only a quarter to play a tune or predict your future. Through a doorway and across a ramp waits a big-sized surprise: a 35' antique wooden sailboat that braved a 10 year voyage around the world, captained by Carla Ward's own brother.
Ever a work in progress, Tinkertown is ready to inspire your imagination and awaken your creative spirit. (Copied in part from the Tinkertown website)
This map shows many of the visitors that have stopped by from around the world.
It's about time for Jenna's little red jacket to go a new little girl. But Jenna loves her jacket, even though it's a mite bit too small for her. For now, that's a battle I choose not to fight. If it makes my daughter happy, that's good enough for me. Winter will soon be over and red jacket will be forgotten. (Click photo to biggify the glass bottle wall)

What's cookin'?
I liked the horse art and Jenna liked the snake art.
An old Chuckwagon.

Val, Fantastyk Voyager was excited to see her trail name moniker as a metal sculpture.

I love this: "Live Life AS the Pursuit of Happiness"
The owner, Carla is a retired Hunter/Jumper Eventer of 14 years. We enjoyed a wonderful conversation about horses and she even gave me her old Parelli halter and rope. I was so surprised and honored and I now consider her a dear friend.

The entryway into the Gift Shop.
One of the plaques inside the museum.

Letterboxing~Leaf Monsters

As most of my readers are probably aware, I'm an outside-gal. I love to be outside, hiking, exploring, horse-back riding, playing with my kids and animals, camping, and Letterboxing.

Autumn is one of my favorite times of year. I enjoy seeing the trees turn color and think it's fun to walk over the fallen leaves listening to the crunch-crunch sound.

Everyone in my family seems to enjoy this seasonal pastime, too. Except for my daughter.

She's afraid of leaves.

As some of you know, my daughter suffers from OCD and Aspergers/High Functioning Autism. One of the symptoms seems to be latching onto irrational fears. She's 'chosen' leaves.
She's been afraid of leaves on the ground, moving around, and leaves on the trail, that might brush her skin, for as long as I can remember. She's not just a little bit afraid. She's terrified and will go into a panic even thinking about touching a leaf.

It's good we don't live back east anymore, where trees with leaves number in the thousands. And raking leaves into piles, for kids to jump into and play in, is as normal and common experience for all children every Autumn.

For her leaves are nothing to be messed around with. The bigger the leaf, the more horrible it must be, waiting to gnash it's teeth and carry my daughter away.

So, as you can imagine, including my daughter in Fall hiking, camping and Letterboxing trips can be quite the challenge. She loves to be a part of everything we do, though, so I try to bring her along at most opportunities. Except It usually means I become a pack mule. But if my sons are along, they generously help carry their leaf-challenged sister, to give my aching back a break.

My neighbor friend, Val, over at Fantastyk Voyage and I recently drove down about 40 mins south to the Manzano Mountains, Fourth of July Canyon to search for a letterbox placed there. Jenna tagged along, too.

All the leaves had fallen off the trees. There were alot of dead, crunchy leaves on the ground.
Here's Val on the leaf-covered trail.


Val wrote up a wonderful post on our Fall letterboxing adventures, with some lovely photos, too. You can see them on her Lost in Fallen Leaves post.

We located the letterbox, as well as a Hitchhiker box nearby, too. (We relocated it to the Quarri letterbox location, after we left Fourth of July Canyon) We stamped in with the cleverly created, and pretty stamp, made some leaf rubbings (just Val and I, of course), and enjoyed the nature and the sound of the wind in the trees.




As you can rightly imagine, Jenna was not about to set one foot on the ground.



For more info on Letterboxing.

Piñon Harvesting

Last week my neighbor friend Val and one of my twin sons went hiking in the Sandia Mountains. We were on a mission to look for piñon nuts for harvesting.

In the high desert region of the Southwestern United States, between 5,500 and 7,000feet, resides one of New Mexico's most precious assets, Pinus edulis, the New Mexico Pinon Tree. The Pinon Tree is New Mexico's State Tree and is often called the "Manna" of the desert. The Pinon nut, has sustained life for humans and animals alike for centuries. The Pinon tree clings to the rim of the canyons, taking root in the solid rock and endures the ravages of nature.

This is a photo I took from our hiking trails. The mountains you see are the backside (or eastside) of the Sandia Mountains.
And here you can see the Westside view of the Sandia Mountains with photos taken 2 years ago from our backyard in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, before we moved to the mountains.

Taking nearly 200 years to produce a 1-foot diameter trunk. An old piñon may be more than 500 years old, and may live as long as 1,000 years.
If the winter-spring is wet, the piñon will produce a good crop of piñons the following year between September and October, an event that happens about every 6 years. Piñons reproduce by seed only, and it takes about 25 years for a tree to begin producing seedcones. A photo looking down one of the trails we hiked.

Piñon nuts are gathered by hand, from wild trees. The harvest is labor intensive, requiring pulling off the cones with a pole or gloves, or picking individual fallen seeds off the ground. The meat of the seed is protected by a heavy shell which must be removed.
I enjoy eating them raw, but roasting brings out the buttery rich flavor even more.
After roasting, the toasted buttery creamy flavor is addictive. Euell Gibbons author of "Handbook of Edible Wild Plants" described Piñon nuts "The most palatable of all the wild foods."
Here you can see Val and Jem harvesting (and eating) pinon nuts from the ground.

The nuts can be prepared and eaten in many different ways – raw, roasted, boiled, mashed, as a soup or ground into a paste like peanut butter. There are many unique and delicous recipes to try using pinon nuts. And here in New Mexico, you can find wonderful products to buy using pinons, too. (they also do mail order. hint-hint)
One of my favorite products using pinon nuts is Pinon Coffee. Yummy!

And here's Val filling up her bag full of delicious pinons.

And there is just something truly New Mexican about the spicy scent of pinon wood smoke from cozy fires on a cold winter night. A cup of Pinon Coffee and a plate full of sweet, delicate-tasting New Mexico Biscochitos is as authentic a New Mexico experience as you can imagine.

“Nobody who has sat before a roaring, pitch-boiling, bubbling, scented fire of piñon can think of it as a mere consumption of wood. It is the spirited release of centuries of brilliant sunlight absorbed under a cloudless Southwestern sky, the sudden and instant flow of energy patiently accumulated." from Pinon.com

And here is my recent Pinon Harvest. Which tasty recipes do you think I should make?

The White Stuff

This is what we woke up to this morning. We're expecting snow flurries all day.
Our pumpkins are wrapped in cloaks of white. We like to leave them out for a few weeks and watch to see how their faces change as they decompose. We're weird like that.
The peach tree has finally lost all it's clothes, as my daughter says.
Zuni lives for snowy days. It's fun to watch her joyful romps as she cavorts in the white fluff on the ground. The chickens weren't so sure it was safe to come outside.
The Japanese Silkies, Mr. and Mrs Cotton, seemed the most at home in the snow with their fluffy feathered feet. Sid Vicious and Phyllis Diller, the two Polish chickens were less enthusiastic and crouched down pathetically underneath the chicken house.


We're expecting snow flurries for the next 2 days, followed by sunny days and temps in the 60's. This is typical Autumn in the mountains of New Mexico.

How's the weather in your corner of the world?

Letterboxing~Monkey Cave

In early 1973, scientists with Kirtland AFB conducted a series of experiments on a group of monkeys. They were strapped to chairs for five days at a time, testing their abilities to escape from painful shocks while subjected to increasingly higher levels of radiation.

In August 1973, all five of the the juvenile monkeys had had enough of the torture and made a break for it and escaped to the mountains east of Albuquerque. Once free in the Manzanos, the monkeys soon found the cave whose nickname would be their legacy. They swung happily from trees , scampered over the cliffs, and dined on juniper berries and prickly pears. They spent the chilly nights huddled together in the 25 ft deep cave, that was dug as a test pit, decades ago, by UNM Geology students.

Some of the local residents recall being surprised at seeing the monkeys, with shaved heads, running across South 14. Many other locals remember leaving bananas and other food for the monkeys.

In January 1974, UNM anthropology students began observing the monkeys as a 'mountain primate colony'. In February, Kirtland AFB gave the monkeys over to the university. Numerous attempts to capture the animals soon followed, since their road crossings threatened the safety of motorists, and since the growing monkeys had been wearing tight, chain collars when they escaped.

It was not until May of 1974 that the monkeys were finally rounded up using tranquilizers hidden in food. After being treated for frostbite, the monkeys were allegedly released into another, more isolated part of New Mexico.

~Taken from 'Turquoise Tales' by Mike Smith
Published in the Fall/Winter edition of East Mountain Living
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My pal, Fantastyk Voyager and I thought this unique place was the perfect place to hide a letterbox. So I carved the stamp and created the log book, and we drove over to hike up to Monkey Cave. Fantastyk Voyager and my boys crawled into the cave to explore.
Then it was time to have some fun doing some cliff and rock scrambling.
Here's Val~aka~Fantastyk Voyager scrambling down a rock gulley. She's pretty good.
Here's Jax and Val scurrying down the cliff. And here you can see the entire cliff with Monkey Cave in the center. I was impressed with the way the rocks in the cliff curved and bucked and twisted across the cliff face.This is another smaller cave, further up on the cliff, that is beckoning us to come back to explore.

Have fun finding Monkey Cave!

Letterboxing~Hawk Watch

Last week, my neighbor, horseback-riding, letterboxing friend, Val~AKA~Fantastyk Voyager (her awesome Trail Name), and my twin sons and I went in search of a local letterbox, not far from our home, in the rugged and beautiful Sandia Mountains.

This letterbox was called Letterboxing is for the Birds and was placed on the Hawk Watch Trail by a group of Girl Scouts. We've found several of their boxes already and always enjoyed their creativity, hide locations, and their fun spirits. Ironically, the photo below shows a photo I recently took of a hawk flying over our ranch. These mountains are the route many raptors use for migration, so it's quite common to see them flying overhead.

This is where we were heading. About a 2 mile hike straight up on switchbacks and sandy trails surrounded by cholla, mesquite, juniper, prickly pear and desert scrub oak.
My jokester boys decided to show their excitement as we started out. Notice my one son, Jem, in flip flops. He lives in them and refuses to wear anything but sandals. My husband jokes that when he grows up he should work in Hawaii, so he never has to wear anything but shorts and sandals. Jem thinks that would be a great idea. He's a laid back summer kid.
Jax had a little mishap along the way when he slipped and scraped his knee. He seems to like having scars and scabs to show off, so I sometimes think he assists in finding injury creating opportunities.
This is the valley, looking down on the Village of Carnuel, just before I-40 heads west out to Albuquerque.
As we got higher, the rocks became much larger. We always have a blast rock scrambling together.
I really enjoyed the rock formations, too. This gulley created a wind tunnel, which felt great on this hot day.
Jem and I were taking a break in the 'wind tunnel' while Fantastyk Voyager and Jax hiked farther up towards the letterbox.
They found it!!

Excited Letterboxers!!

Val~AKA~Fantastyk Voyager took this cool photo of Jax up on the rocks.
Then after enjoying the beautiful day and gorgeous views, it was time to head back down. Fantastyk Voyager took this photo of Jax and I heading down the mountain.

And here's a photo of Fantastyk Voyager searching for precious stones.

Jax~The Mountain Boy! He's so silly. And he loves the camera.

One last shot of where we were, taken from the Hawk Watch TrailHead.
(These photos were pulled out of my photo files and were taken before my beloved camera was stolen)