Editor's note: The following story was written as part of a series called "Cheap Thrills" for the Albuquerque Journal. The criteria for these "thrills" are 1) a day-trippable circle roughly 150 miles from Albuquerque and 2) fees of no more than $10. Enjoy.
During Albuquerque sunsets, people find their eyes drawn east to the watermelon blushes of the towering Sandias.
The western horizon, by contrast, stretches in a shadow-black line across the blazing sky.
It's a line as straight and empty as the rim of a pie-tin, interrupted only by a cluster of bumps -- "The Volcanoes."
Petroglyph National Monument
Location: Take I-40 west to the Shooting Range Park exit and then north for 4.7 miles to the Volcanoes Park access road.
Hours: During daylight hours.
Cost: Free
Features: Climbing, caves and petroglyphs.
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Five miles beyond the river, the biggest bump#151;called Vulcan—rises to 6,036 feet. (For comparison, Sandia Crest is 10,678 feet; downtown Albuquerque is at 4,950 feet.)
Vulcan and its companions, poking up from the ridge separating the Rio Grande and the Rio Puerco, were active volcanoes about a million years ago.
They spilled out the layers of lava that have eroded into the miles-long basalt escarpment on which Indians a thousand years ago began to inscribe petroglyphs.
One recent Saturday afternoon I set out to conquer Vulcan. Why? Because it's there, of course. But also because for climbers of my ilk no peak can be too small.
I drove west on I-40 to the Shooting Range Park exit and then north for 4.7 miles to the Volcanoes Park access road, located just a few yards before a sign announcing entrance to the Double Eagle II Airport.
The volcanoes are in the Petroglyph National Monument and there is no admission fee.
I parked at a gate at the very foot of Vulcan and rest-stepped my way up one of the many ascent routes to the top of the mini-mountain.
Climbing time: seven minutes. I went slowly to avoid slipping on the loose volcanic scoria underfoot.
I perched on the tip-top chunk of rock and was immediately enveloped by a cloud of biting flies.
Luckily, the sunscreen lotion I'd carried up proved also to be a fly-repellant.
Peering over the lip of my rock, I looked down into the bowl of a rust-red crater adjoining Vulcan#151;and into the upturned faces of five people scaling Vulcan's eastern slope, much steeper than the backside route I'd chosen.
This climbing party, which included two children, was a group of new Albuquerque residents who'd moved here within the month from Southern Califorma.
One of them, a construction worker named Sidney Stewart, joined me on the tip-top rock and together we gazed across the Rio Grande toward Sandia Crest. "It's nice," he said, "to be able to look across that valley and not see any smog!"
I considered telling these brand new New Mexicans about the Brown Cloud Problem of Albuquerque's winter inversions. But I decided not to disillusion them. Instead we swapped in-state exploration tips.
Tim Gallagher, another construction worker in their climbing party, had meanwhile been exploring Vulcan, and he returned to tell us there was a cave on the east side just beneath the summit.
We dropped down to the cave, as roomy as a full-sized car, and then continued our conversation outside its entrance, in shade just now beginning to creep down Vulcan's eastern flank.
My new friends raved about the clear air and open space of New Mexico. In California, they said, a volcanic attraction like this, so close to a city, would be swarming with hundreds of tourists.
Below us, in the valley of the Rio Grande, half-a-million people went about their weekend business. But here on Vulcan, just the six of us talked on.
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