Hiking in New Mexico

No, not me. My friend Angela and her husband who live in Albuquerque sent me these photos from their weekend hike. About this first photo, she writes:

These pics are from the Mars Court Trail in the Cibola National Forest (pronounced See-bow-lah) just a few miles southeast of Albuquerque. Hard to imagine that just to the West on the other side of the ridge lies such a huge expanse of desert...
This is the actual Mars Court Trail at 7400 feet:

Angela identified this as an Abert's Squirrel, which I've never heard of... but now I know why. I just knew garden-variety Central Park squirrels, or as we call them, rats with bushy tails. Wikipedia says: Abert's squirrel (or tassel-eared squirrel) (Sciurus aberti) is a tree squirrel in the genus Sciurus endemic to the Rocky Mountains from United States to Mexico, with concentrations found in Arizona, The Grand Canyon, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. So this squirrel was in the right place -- weird little ears, though!

And finally the required sunset photo which Angela calls
NM sunset - Hwy 337.