Fires and Smoke in New Mexico

Dawn

With so many fires starting with the Wallow fire in eastern Arizona, our state has been in the path for a lot of smoke [picture above is what sunrise looks like]. Now there are some serious fires right over the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, north of Santa Fe in Los Alamos.

The Los Alamos fire is a new one as of this weekend. It is a national emergency due to the work of the Los Alamos lab there.

The smoke gives the land a strange color and the sun turns red.

Thick smoke is quite a filter

Strange light and a red sun color the land below in eerie light

Yesterday at 3PM while out in the garden the smoke was mixing with the regular clouds [bottom picture]. Made for very strange looking cloud cover.

Spring Time in the Rockies

I've been growing some seedlings in the kitchen.  Getting ready to plant them tomorrow.  These are pumpkins and bush and vine buttercup squash. I put them out on the porch to acclimate them to the outside weather.  They have spent the past few nights out also even though the nights got down to the mid-thirties; those are the temperatures they will see out in the garden areas.

The potato crop and sugar snap peas are already in the ground and growing. Sugar snap peas don't mind cold weather. The potatoes are less hardy but haven't come up through the dirt mounds over them as yet.

Nipper

Nipper is still with me.  For those of you who remember Nipper, she is 16 years old now and this is what she does most of the time.  When she is awake and outside with the other three dogs, she is still alpha dog.  They still defer to her and she is the tiniest of them all.  Canine dynamics are fun to watch.

Finally! Snow has arrived.

We had such a long fall and early winter without any moisture we were wondering when we would get some up here. The mid west has been inundated with multiple snow storms but they never made it here.


We had two storms a couple days apart, then off and on again snow flurries.

The dogs love it out there but we also have sub zero degree temps to contend with. Neither the dogs nor I enjoy those. One night it got down to minus 20. Too much brrrr in that kind of weather. As you can see, Tuffy is up to her belly in it. In most places it's about a foot now. We're supposed to get nice weather now... so it will all change to slush.