New Mexico

A ruined adobe bell tower standing over a cemetery of wooden crosses in dry grass. — The San Gerónimo mission church at the pueblo outside Taos, shelled and burned in 1847.2016 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring

I spent years working on a ranch outside Cimarron, in the northeastern corner of New Mexico, and the state stuck: my Dad grew to like it as much as I did. It is high country — six and a half thousand feet at the ranch and climbing from there into the Sangre de Cristos — and the climate is most of the reason to go: dry and bright, warm in the sun and cool the moment you step out of it, with thunderheads stacking over the mountains most summer afternoons and gone again by evening. These photographs come from two family trips back, one in May 2012 and one at the end of July 2016: Philmont Basecamp, a lane off the plaza in Taos, a Jeep trail through the spruce and across a creek in the mountains above town, and the ruins of the old San Gerónimo mission church at the pueblo, left as a memorial since the army shelled and burned it during the Taos Revolt in 1847.

Photos from New Mexico

Outside the mess hall at Philmont Basecamp, in May 2012.
2012 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring
A creek crossing in the mountains outside Taos, in the summer of 2016.
2016 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring
A lane off the plaza in Taos.
2016 · Photograph by Joe Steinbring