Week 11: Valles Caldera Artist Residency
I still can't believe I'm here!
Hello, hello! Hope you had a great week!
To all the new subscribers: thank you so much for following along! It’s been 11 weeks since we sold our house in Austin, Texas and started traveling full time in our converted Ford Transit camper van. And what adVANture it’s been!
I started my artist residency at Valles Caldera National Preserve on August 6th, and while we’ve been here a week and a half at the time of writing this post it still feels like a dream come true!
We’ve settled in to the cabin and have a little routine going, including getting woken up by elk — or owls — most mornings! Love it! Best alarm clock ever.
Everyone been so helpful and I have a bunch of work in progress.
We’ve been sleeping in the van and working/cooking in the cabin, and this is the view that we wake up to from the window by heads. The aspens sound so pretty — and the air smells so good I can eat it for breakfast!
Here are the highlights from this week:
Our 27 Year Anniversary!
Thursday, August 15th marked 27 years since we’ve been married! How is that even possible? We got married at Jason’s parent’s house in East Liverpool, Ohio — my Dad walked me down the hallway. :)
Our original plan was to have the ceremony outside but Mother Nature had other plans and it started pouring rain, so we quickly moved a bunch of chairs into the living room (which is pretty chapel-like itself).
After we said “I do” a rainbow appeared — which we were told is good luck!
To celebrate this year we decided to go for a hike here at Valles Caldera. We started from the cabin where we’re staying for my residency, headed towards South Mountain trail and then took Redondo Loop up back towards the cabin for a 7.25 mile hike.
We hiked through beautiful meadows — which I’ve learned are officially called montane grasslands — and burn scars — both were equally fascinating!
I never heard of a burn scar before coming to New Mexico, but now we’ve been noticing them everywhere. A burn scar is a scar on the landscape after a forest fire has been through an area. There may be downed or dead trees, soil erosion, or other changes. But there is also new growth to be found.
We checked the park rules to make sure, and we’re allowed to pick one pint of berries per day for personal use only, so when we spied some raspberries growing along La Jara creek we just had to sample them — so good y’all!
I told J that they tasted better than anything we could get at a fancy restaurant!
We kept hearing — and smelling — elk, but even though we scanned the mountainsides with a monocular we didn’t spot any. We DID spot western bluebirds, hawks, mountain chickadees and we found two new-to-us plants: seep monkeyflower and creeping barberry.
J found seep monkeyflower (Erythranthe guttata) while I was doing a quick sketch of cut leaf coneflowers that reminded me of us, and it turns out that it was a new observation for the park on iNaturalist — cool!
We followed an elk trail back down the mountain to get to the cabin — what a great 7.25 mile hike.
Then after a dinner of black bean burritos (made with leftovers — no cooking, woo!) we were treated to the most amazing sunset on the porch.
What a great way to celebrate our anniversary — and here’s to 27 more!
The Yellowstone of New Mexico
On Friday we got to visit Sulfur Springs with Dr. Bill Sayre, geologist extraordinare and park volunteer. It rocked!
This part of Valles Caldera was acquired in 2020 and is still being developed — although it is completely open to the public. In the past it had been used as a sulphur mine then a spa/resort but forest fires burned it down. There are mudpots, fumaroles (steam vents) and a highly acidic lake with a pH of 1!
I kept trying to imagine how to paint this, and not have the rocks just look like dirty snow! Bill explained that the rocks are bleached from a reaction with the sulfur.
We saw elk tracks leading up to the lake — it seems they can drink it without harm — at least not immediate harm, anyhow! The ripples you see in the distance are carbon dioxide bubbles. I posted a video of the lake here on instagram if you’d like to check it out.
The air smelled like sulfur — which I actually think smells good — although I also like the smell of skunks too, ha!
I’m glad we got to see it before boardwalks and rules and regulations are put in, although walking across the ground was a little nerve wracking after Bill told us how sometimes there’s just a crust of earth that you can break through to hot water below.
The ground also felt hot to me — but maybe it was just my imagination!
There are also sulfur crystals that form along steam vents!
What an amazing place — Valles Caldera truly is the Yellowstone of New Mexico!
Nature Journaling Workshop
On Sunday I did my first of two nature journaling workshops as part of my art residency. It was so fun getting to share my love of nature journaling at this beautiful place — and the best part was seeing people get excited and think “hey, I can do this too”!
Such a great group of people turned out, and only 3 of them had ever used a water brush before!
I love how we all were sketching at the same location, yet we each noticed different things.
If you’re in the area, there are still some spots left in next week’s workshop! Here are the details:
Date: Saturday, August 24
Time: 10:00 am to 12:00 pm
Location: Meet at the Ranger Station
Join artist-in-residence Lisa Spangler (that’s me!) for a nature journaling workshop on August 24! Through presentations, demonstrations, and guided practice, participants will learn the art of documenting discoveries in nature on paper with words and sketches. Take home what you create! All supplies will be provided. Click here for more info.
Follow Your Dreams
I’m sitting out on the porch of the cabin where I get to stay for my residency and I’m feeling so lucky and grateful.
When I first found out about the National Park Service’s artist in residency program, I was a software engineer at a big corporation (in a windowless office) and I thought about how I’d absolutely love to do that someday. Now I’m living the dream. What are you dreaming of doing? Take one small step today to start on your way!
That’s it for this week! Thanks so much for following along on our adventures. And as always, just let us know if you have any questions! — Lisa and Jason
I would love to hear more about your residency! I am writing my first book, and preparing for my own first residency next month-- and researching residencies for next year! If you have time, I would love to hear more about
- How the NP residency works (and how to find them)
- How you are structuring your time in the residency
Thanks Lisa! :)
Lovely location and photos. What a fantastic opportunity for you both.