Hiking options around Santa Fe are plentiful and we foundt the landscape once you were out of the city area quite different than we were expecting — Aspen trees and evergreen are lush and everywhere. We had a period where the weather got to be quite frigid and we paused on doing too much outdoors, but sharing some of our favorites. William used the AllTrails app to download maps so that when we were in areas without service, the phone’s GPS could still keep us on track – found this to be clutch a few times.

Dale Ball North Loop – This hike is just north of Santa Fe — it meanders a bit, reaches a peak and then drops back again — and then you get to turn around and go up, down and up again.

Afterwards, we drove up above 10K feet elevation and let the boys play in the bit of snow that clung to the ground:

Borrego Bear Wallow Trail – This trail is just north of the Ten Thousand Waves Japanese village — the Aspen trees along the path are stunning. Rawls decided this day was just too darn cold to hike (and since I kind of agreed with him) so we detoured to visit the village of Tesuque while William and Shepherd conquered this trail 🙂

Atalaya Trail – This trail leaves off from a local college — the first part takes you through an arroyo that during rainy seasons, would be full. The vegetation in the arroyo was like nothing we’d seen on the trip. Rawls enjoyed finding sap from trees along the way to theoretically contribute to gluing his iron man costume together.

and for William’s birthday we decided to head back to Borrego-Bear Wallow (his request) to all do the trail together, adding cousin Sean into the mix. We all loved it, some especially when it was over!