Sonya's Blog - Day 256 - Sandia Peak

Sonya’s Blog - Day 256 - March 4th - Sandia Peak

We are going to ride the tram to Sandia Peak today, the highest point in Albuquerque. We tried to do this on Tuesday, but they do maintenance on Tuesdays. We decided that we were going to take the Tram to the the top, have a look around and have some lunch. There is a ski hill up there, but it is closed of the season. I guess it closed 2 weeks ago. Usually it is open until mid-March, but they didn’t get a lot of snow this year and it has been extremely warm.

Sandia means watermelon in Spanish. It is believed that the mountains were named this, due to their reddish glow at sunset.

There are two trams, and they are always going opposite each other. The weight of the one going down, helps to push the one going up. It was a 15 minute ride to the top. We started at around 6000 ft and the top of the mountain is 10,000 ft. We were very high up, for the second 1/2 of the ride. Isaac and I didn’t love it so much.

It was much chillier, at the top of the mountain. We had a quick look around and then went and had lunch. There was still quite a bit of snow up top, mostly on the ski hill side.

There is one restaurant at the top and it totally has a ski lodge feel to it. We settled in and had a bit of nostalgia. We miss skiing. We had a great view from out table, which helped to make our dining experience more enjoyable, as the food was only mediocre.

We were going to hike to the highest point, but it got quite windy and cold. Also, the trails still had quite a bit of snow on them, which would have made hiking difficult. We opted to get go to all the look-outs instead. Isaac had a great time throwing snowballs at Natasha and Blake, he knows better than to throw them at me.

When we were all done looking around, we took the tram back down. The tram operator pointed out the site of a plane crash, from the 50’s I think. The area around the mountain is a no-fly zone today. I guess the tail wing was visible, but we were not able to see it.

Isaac in one of the original chairlift chairs:

It was about 4 when we got back to the campsite, so we just hung around and walked Kizmet. We had a late supper and didn’t do much else for the rest of the day.

Sonya