Itching to get outdoors on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, my friend, Alan, and I hopped in the car and headed out for a serendipity photography ramble. On the proposed itinerary were three very small villages south of Santa Fe: Lamy, Galisteo, and Cerillos.
After lunch on the outskirts of Santa Fe, we drove on to Lamy (pronounced "LAY-mee"), so named for Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy, who served as Bishop of the Santa Fe diocese from 1853 to 1885. He was the model for the fictional archbishop in Willa Cather's novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Today, Lamy's principal reason for existence is the Amtrak train station closest to Santa Fe. We happened to arrive just in time to see the Southwest Chief roll in on its way from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Besides the daily Amtrak train, there's also a wildly-painted tourist train that runs on the 18-mile spur from Lamy to Santa Fe, featuring themed events from wine tasting to outlaw ambush. To visit their website, click here.
The station was decorated in New Mexico holiday style.
Here are a couple of images from a visit to Lamy in 2021:
And watch out for the loose caboose!
From Lamy we headed 8 miles southwest to Galisteo, another small village (pop. maybe 200). Not far from the village is the Cerro Pelon Movie Ranch, where pieces of a lot of western movies were filmed, including Young Guns, 3:10 to Yuma, Silverado, and The Cowboys.
We poked around for things to photograph and found this one-lane bridge:
We were apprehensive about driving across it, but while we were photographing it, another car came along and drove over it, so we figured it was safe enough . . . and lived to tell the tale.
On our way out of town we noticed an old overgrown cemetery up on a hill above the town, so of course we had to stop and photograph it. The cemetery was enclosed by a rock wall, and the front gate was locked with a padlock, so we chose not to enter, and photographed it from outside the wall. Here are a few views:
Our last destination was Cerillos, originally a mining town for nearby deposits of turquoise, gold, silver, and other minerals. There is evidence of Native American mining in the hills surrounding the village as far back as 700-900 CE; in the 16th and 17th centuries the mines were controlled by Spanish colonizers using indigenous people as slaves.
After the end of the Spanish-American War in 1848, land grants were taken from the Spanish owners and reopened to Anglo-American settlers. By 1880, the area surrounding Cerillos had a population of 1,200 - 1,500, and eventually there were over 2,000 registered mines. By 1900, however, the mines were exhausted and shutting down, and, like many other New Mexico mining towns, Cerillos began its long slow decline, exacerbated by the Depression and World War II. Today, there are only about 200 people in the town and environs.
There is still a very active and beautiful church in Cerillos -- St. Joseph's, established in 1922. We arrived as the sun was sinking fast in the west, but it provided beautiful light for photographing the church.
Here's the "Homage to Ansel Adams" version, complete with moonrise:
If you would like to see these images in a larger format, please visit my photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, by clicking here.
Enjoy!
