View from the valley of the Rio Bonito

Here is a pencil sketch of a vista which I have depicted in oils and marker: the north side of the valley of the Rio Bonito, setting of Lincoln, New Mexico. These are the only mountains I have ever climbed…I’ve scaled the north side with my wife and the south side with Matt, Spook, Carol and Burnsie. It took us probably a couple of hours and we used no equipment and met no disaster, so they are pretty easy mountains, I’m sure. The dark green mountains peeking behind are the Capitan Mountains. Supposedly, the Capitans are the only mountain range in North America which has an overall east-west orientation. The Capitans’ most famous inhabitant was Smokey Bear, found as a cub in a tree there in 1950 in the wake of a fire. The north face of the Capitans is the site of the fabled Roswell UFO crash. My buddy Matt, a Lincoln inhabitant, was a firm believer in the authenticity of that event. This may be because his friend Glen was the undertaker called in by the Air Force to provide child-sized coffins for the alien corpses.