Mesa del Sol

Unrestricted access and use of open space lands by motorized vehicles has caused severe erosion; led to the creation of excessive dust, noise, littering, dumping, shooting, and vandalism in violation of county ordinances; and the deterioration of the publicly owned resources; and is hereby declared a public nuisance.

Bernalillo County Code, Sec. 58-96

Having come down the arroyo from above, we did not see the sign until we were past it.

We were on foot, walking bicycles down the arroyo. The barbed wire, such as it was, marked the boundary between the county-owned open space from which we came and land owned by PNM, our electric utility.

Living in Albuquerque, atop a thin layer of pavement, it is easy to forget how much of our community is built atop sand hills. Out exploring on the city’s edges, we’ve run into this over and over, enough times that we know to expect it: things that look like bike rideable dirt roads on satellite view or Open Street Map, or for the first hundred yards of nicely graveled surface, end up being sand. Walk-a-bike, the great challenge for the old man with the arthritic feet (me).

And yet there we were this morning, atop the sand hills, looking down and wanting to go there.

Learn a lot

The weather’s hotting up, suggesting as early a start as I can muster for the Sunday ride. (See “old man” bit above, the heat really takes it out of me!) I am not religious, but there is value in ritual. On Sundays, we ride.

That usually means I’m out the door at sunup, long before Lissa’s awake. But she was up early this morning, reading a fascinating book about flannel. When I went in to say goodbye, the friendly kiss of 40 years of marriage, she looked up from her book and said, “Have fun. Learn a lot!”

Lissa gets it.

Embodied geography

The geomorphic features of landscape (in this case the sand hills) combine with land tenure, land ownership, collective intentions (the “rules”) and lived experience to create place, or space. The social creation of space, to borrow a useful conceptual framework from the French philosopher (sociologist? geographer?) Henri LeFebvre.

LeFebvre’s ideas are an abstraction. For me, going out and looking at stuff is where the action is, moving through the space.

Dirt roads that seem to have been cut by off road vehicle enthusiasts provide a helpful structure to our exploring in places like the sand hills of Mesa del Sol. County government may in a formal sense find this to be a nuisance – I do not. I become less and less normative as I grow older.

I’m pretty sure that, in walking our bikes along the off-roaders’ trails and down the arroyo, we didn’t meet the formal legal test of being a “nuisance” as defined by Sec. 58-96. I was on the e-bike today, though, which is “motorized.” I will need to consult my attorney.

I often do research of a sort before rides like this. At its simplest, it involves looking at maps for places I’ve not yet been. Yesterday afternoon and this morning, I also read old newspaper stories about the Mesa del Sol development slowly taking shape on the mesa above. (Planning first begun: 1983.) With Google Earth, I nailed down the construction of the road connecting Mesa del Sol to Albuquerque (2006). With my old Strava data, I found what looks like the first time I rode out there (2010). It’s possible I rode out there earlier, before what I call “the GPS era.” But I think it unlikely.

We rarely end up going quite where we plan – that’s the joy of what the Situationists (French!) called the “dèrive.” So my return home often requires further research. Whose land was that sign on?

We’ve been riding out to Mesa del Sol regularly since its early days, because they built a huge and lovely road (not, in a formal legal sense, a “nuisance”) and hardly anyone used it. Great bike riding. Lissa and I have taken to driving out there as well, the better to see big vistas and horizons and clouds without power lines in the way (one of Lissa’s current artistic practices- she hates power lines).

The Mesa del Sol development flywheel is now engaged, new homes going up at a steady clip, a big Netflix movie studio complex, and yet another round of solar tech enthusiasm, so there’s more traffic, but the road’s got a nice multi-use path alongside it now, so traffic’s not an issue. The addition of the e-bike to my shed makes the up-and-down-and-up of the road into Mesa del Sol manageable for my old guy legs.

The steady pace of change rewards regular visits – always something new to see! Today’s newness was an expanded soccer complex for the kids, though the new park management norm of closed gates is clearly a nuisance. I still have my normative moments. The gates were permeable enough, though, that we were able to get in and look around at the lovely new facilities (Were we a nuisance?) before heading off over the lip of the mesa and down the sand hills.