Troublesome realities seem far away at Tres Piedras (Three Rocks).  Pine needles, chamisa, and sagebrush scent the air.  The aroma of coffee grounds, boiled in a cookpot, wafts tantalizingly through camp as it mingles with cedar smoke.  The black ash fragments of paper from the fire are whisked upward on invisible currents.  A circle of rocks contains the cheery fire at the center of camp.  The fire is for talking over, cooking on, staring into, and standing around.  Scrub oak screen the dirt road in front, and a pine surrounded by more scrub oak guards the rear.  To one side stands a small pine, and a cluster of chamisa.  Altogether they border a grassy area that is the camp.

The camp is on the gentle slope of the ridge that faces east toward the Rio Grande Gorge ten miles distant.  On the opposing horizon looms Wheeler Peak, dominating the Taos quad.  The plain between undulates gently, and is bisected by the cleavage of the Gorge created eons ago by the massive uplifting of the Taos plain, and the relentless carving downward of the Rio Grande River as the plain was thrust upward.  Today a crevice in the basalt plain, perhaps 150 yards wide, plunges hundreds of feet straight down to a turbid, green river still carving deeper as it hurries to the Gulf of Mexico.

Cerros de Taos and Tres Orejas are the only interruptions of the plain.  Even their lines are gentle in relief against the panorama of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (Blood of Christ).  Sparse grasses, sheep, rocks, lichens, and John Nichols inhabit the plain.  Water is very deep on the plain, and so the stock  ponds are centers of activity.  The plain appears uninterrupted from the ridge, but a network of old volcanic fissures and arroyos provide invisible pathways across the expanse, eventually going to the Gorge as all roads lead to Rome.

North of our little acre are the piles of rock formations, three in number, which give the name Tres Piedras to the area.  The northern horizon offers the impressive San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, recalling Louis L'Amour's book title, To the Far Blue Mountains.

To the rear of the camp, a bare half mile, is the crest of the ridge that is the top of the gentle east side of the Tusas Range, bordered by the Brazos Cliffs on the west, and on the south by the escarpment descending into the Espanola Valley.

If it sounds like a little, no, a big slice of heaven, it is!  God made it the day that He felt like making man something really special.  They tell me that it's the light.  Artists, who have mountains where they live, come from all over the world to paint the mountains, the sky, the gorge, and the light.  It is at once golden, and clear.  It is blue.  It is green.  It is ephemeral and magical....