When my mother was here visiting she said Albuquerque has more people bicycling and better walking and bicycling infrastructure than any place she’s seen.  This reminded me it is important to take stock and be grateful for what we have.  She looked at the extensive multiuse trail system, all the bike lanes and the pedestrian/bicycle bridges and figured there were some forward looking people behind this.  Plus tons of people bicycle.  I appreciate the riding here.  The bicycling is good in much of the city and on the edges, and it gets better as you ride out.

These photos are from rides past the Hagan ghost town, the Los Lunas loop, and a walk on the river

If you’re looking for clean air, diverse cultures and landscapes and open vistas the Albuquerque area has these resources.  You can go in any direction and experience beautiful country.  There  are wild horses running on the northeast shoulder of the Sandia Mountains.  Freedom horses.

I saw so many people out bicycling today on Tramway Road and all over the city.  Bicyclists are a resilient community.  If you’re willing to mix it up and ride some dirt roads, multi use trails, and paved roads you can ride to the horizon and beyond.  I feel like you can ride forever here.   If we make the bicycling even better we’ll be more sustainable, healthier and freer.

I love these words from Cormac McCarthy.  Buy his new book The Passenger coming out soon.

That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.  From All the Pretty Horses, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 1992