Home»All Photographs»New Mexico»Valle de Oro NWR/Rio Grande bosque 2017-10-25

After my visit a week ago to the Rio Grande bosque in the northern part of Albuquerque and not seeing the color I hoped to find, this week I went to see what the bosque in Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge in southern Albuquerque had to offer for color. There I found plenty of yellow in the leaves, so much so that in some places the sun filtering through the leaves charged the scene below with a yellow haze. The old cottonwoods in this woods also look like they too likely have interesting stories to tell. The flow of the river was down, allowing many new bars and islands to appear. Sadly, the hundred or more young cottonwoods planted along the high water edge of the river's floodplain during the spring, all seem to have died through the summer, even with the relatively high flows the river had throughout this summer ... I did not see one survivor.