Most of these
situations involve a bureaucrat or service representative informing a New
Mexican that their state is actually a foreign country and therefore special
postage or a passport is required - or even worse that the thing they want to
do just can't be done.
None of our
friends or acquaintances seem to be afflicted with this shortcoming – they all
seem to know where and what New Mexico is – but many of them don’t quite get
what the weather is like when you get there.)
Still Missing – But Getting Warmer
Mars and I
spent the winter holidays in Santa Fe, NM with our daughter-in-law and son (M
and B) who live there. When we returned
home to Connecticut we were greeted by a pile of Christmas cards. On one of them our good friends MJ and J had
written, “Hoping you are enjoying your Christmas visit to warm New Mexico.”
“Nooooooooo! Not in the winter!” popped into our
collective minds.
We’ve been
traveling to northern New Mexico for almost twenty-five years now and hear
things like that quite a lot – sometimes from people like MJ and J, who are in
fact frequent travelers to Arizona and know exactly who its eastern neighbor
is. It seems that even those who are
totally “not missing” New Mexico’s geographic location and/or national
affiliation cannot help themselves from placing the Land of Enchantment in the
wrong temperate zone.
In truth Mars
and I have only seen that part of New Mexico from Albuquerque northward but we
have heard that temperatures in the lower part of the state can be
significantly warmer. It is however
worth mentioning that on the day I initially began this essay the temp in
Carlsbad was a brisk nineteen degrees – while Santa Fe was a comparatively
balmy twenty-four. The average high for
December is fifty-nine versus forty-three.
(It actually
took me several Internet sites to find out this info. When I asked online for a “New Mexico
temperature map” I was told “Oh no! The
page you are looking for does not exist. Go back, friend, go back!” Evidently even the weather.com website is
confused about where New Mexico is climatically.)
We travelled
to Arizona once on an Elderhostel trip to the Grand Canyon and the Sonoran
Desert. And the major thing that we
learned was that, especially in the western United States, altitude equals
latitude – or as someone else put it in an Internet chat about weather
conditions in NM, “elevation means everything out west.”.
That author
went on to say that a good “rule of thumb” for altitude (even on the east
coast) is 1,000 feet of altitude = 300 miles of latitude = 4 degrees F in temperature. Santa Fe is forty miles north of
Albuquerque and 2,000 feet higher. So it
is usually about 8.5 degrees cooler in the “City Different” than it is in the
“Duke City”. Our home town of Wethersfield, CT has an altitude of forty-five feet above sea level. Santa Fe is about 7,000 feet at its lowest – more than enough to eliminate any temperate effects of Northern New Mexico's more southern latitude.
Mars and I
first learned about winter weather in northern New Mexico when we renewed our
wedding vows at half-time of a University of New Mexico “Lady Lobo” basketball game with 11,000 of
our closest friends on Valentine’s Day in 2004.
(It was a contest, which we and about twenty other couples won.)
We flew out
for a long weekend and visited Ten Thousand Waves Spa in Santa Fe on the
afternoon before the ceremony. It was,
to be generous, in the low twenties with a gale-force wind chill – or so it
seemed – as we soaked outdoors in 100 degree plus waters with piles of snow on
the ground around us while our hair and the wooden deck froze solid with each
splash of liquid. Albuquerque was
probably eight and one-half degrees warmer – but we didn’t really care.
This year all
four of us sat in the same hot tub as snow fell lightly on our heads and steam
from the heated waters fogged our glasses.
On Christmas Day we all hiked in an arroyo at Museum Hill with our
grand-greyhound Cheyenne. The air was in
the low thirties but the warm Zia sun allowed us to remove our gloves and hats,
unzip our jackets, and unwrap our scarves.
In and around this we visited with “the kids” and their friends (some
now ours also) – and enjoyed the heat (dumb-downed for New Englanders) of our
daughter-in-law’s posole, and carnitas plus her non-Southwest comida such as
cheese fondue, Italian Wedding soup, strada, and gingerbread cake.
On our last
day in New Mexico we met up with Mars’ BFF from high school who now lives in
Albuquerque to hike along the Rio Grande Bosque, and dine on her tamales and
black bean soup. On our drive back from
the river we pulled over to visit with a group of Sand Hill Cranes who, as they do
every year, had fled to northern New Mexico from the Great White North for the
winter season.
The morning
after our travel day back home I went for a walk along the bicycle trail that
begins across the street from out house.
The dial on our outdoor thermometer pointed to the same numbers that we
experienced in Santa Fe – but the ambient New England air felt much cooler than
that of the ten previous days.
New Mexico is
way less humid than Connecticut. So
maybe it was because cold moist air actually does feel colder than dry air –
something about moist air having a higher specific heat.
Or maybe – in
spite of all the meteorology – MJ and J, and the Cranes are actually right. It is warmer in New Mexico – at least at Christmas.
Sources:
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