SantaFe.com

Go to the Cimarron River for the fishing, but bring your hiking boots — or vice versa.

With gorgeous hiking and a great chance at seeing bears, deer and elk, even the most focused angler would do well to check out Cimarron Canyon’s trails. And hikers with even a casual interest in fishing may want to wet a line in one of New Mexico’s premier trout waters.

The tiny Cimarron River, one of only a few in New Mexico that lead to the Mississippi River rather than the Rio Grande, is known far and wide for its large, healthy trout.

“I was at Sportsman’s Warehouse in Albuquerque the other day, and...

Saturday, July 12, 2008
by Bryce Petersen, Jr. • Journal Santa Fe

PILAR — The Rio Grande’s Racecourse section is getting rowdy. But its wildest rapid, Souse Hole, is just getting started.

“This is a guide’s favorite time of year,” said Neil Oberheide, a guide for New Wave Rafting, on a Memorial Day trip near the Taos County line. “We’re just as excited as you are.”

The reason the guides get excited each year at this time is the big water that spring normally brings. In an ordinary year, that means peak flows of around 3,500 cubic feet per second on the Rio Grande. But this is no ordinary year, with record-setting runoff resulting in unusually brisk flows.

Monday, June 2, 2008
by Bryce Petersen, Jr. • Journal Santa Fe

Fly anglers have already lost two popular caddis hatches to high water this season, and the spring runoff has only just begun. But fish biologists and advocates are joining anglers in looking past a tough fishing spring to what could be a banner summer.

“The overall picture is good, because we don’t have to worry about the streams getting low and hot this summer,” said William Schudlich, chairman of the New Mexico Council of Trout Unlimited.

With a heavy snowpack waiting in the mountains of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, a reasonably cool summer could keep the rivers flowing...

Monday, June 2, 2008
by Bryce Petersen, Jr. • Journal Santa Fe

JEMEZ SPRINGS— The spring thaw is quickly melting snow and drying trails in the lower elevations of the Jemez Mountains, and now is the ideal time to visit the area's hot springs, ahead of the summer-time crush of bathers.

The dormant volcanoes that created what is now the caldera for which the Valles Caldera National Preserve is named still heat underground water that bubbles to the Earth's surface in at least three locations.

The best known— and the most crowded— is Spence Springs, just north of Jemez Springs near the Battleship Rock Picnic Area.

Spence's small pools are surrounded by...

Monday, March 24, 2008
by Bryce Petersen, Jr. • Journal Santa Fe