Tourism New Mexico

At the beginning of a workshop on travel photography I attended early this summer, I asked a fellow student why he'd come all the way to New Mexico to study the art of making pictures. "I'm not a beach person," he said. "My idea of a vacation is to work hard at something I love." We were at the Sunday night welcome dinner for the Santa Fe Photography Workshops, which offers a series of about 40 weeklong classes every summer on topics ranging from fashion portraits to digital imaging.

As I write this I am sitting in my truck, deep in the heart of New Mexico's Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. It is high noon and too bright to photograph. Outside, gangs of sandhill cranes move from one field to the next, their gurgling sounds causing me to stop typing and look up in wonder. The 4-foot-tall birds, with their long, graceful necks and super-long legs, sound as if they are underwater. I marvel at the scene before me, then resume my writing.

There were six of us on the porch, and except for the 400 lightning rods, not much else for miles. The rain puddles were deep enough to drown June bugs; the nearest neighbor was seven miles off. Now and again thunder would rumble, and we'd grin dumbly, gaze toward the southern sky and hope for magic. "This," whispered Mary Frances, glancing at the four strangers around us and the bare homesteader's cabin behind us, "is the wackiest vacation I've had in my life.