Back in the day, I used to be really into hiking, but haven't had a lot of time to do it recently. Which is kind of odd considering that I spend more than half my time these days about a mile from Fort Bowie - an old U.S. Army Fort from the days of the Pony Express.

So recently I've gotten my act together and done a few hikes. I brought a camera along for one of them - here are the photos. Beware - even if you just go through the slide show, the pictures are about 800k each. I haven't figured out how to get iWeb to produce both the high resolution and intermediate resolution jpegs. I kept the high resolution because you really don't get a feel for the fact that these are shot up on the mountain until you look at the full resolution images.

If you notice a lot of what look like fallen trees from logging on the distant slopes, don't panic. These are just fallen agave stalks. They get to be quite tall, ten or twelve feet, and then once the flowers go to seed the stalks just fall over. I imagine they help to slow the runoff when it rains, but people also collect them and use them for fencing material.