Somewhere in the mass of mountains on your right is Wheeler Peak: thirteen thousand one hundred and sixty-one feet, the highest point in the state of New Mexico. This whole loop is a lap around it, and it hides well — it is not a dramatic standalone spire but the high point of a wall of peaks, so people drive the entire circle without ever being sure which one it was.
It is named for George Wheeler, an army lieutenant who led one of the great nineteenth-century surveys of the American West in the eighteen seventies. He got a mountain out of it, which is not a bad result.
Above about twelve thousand feet up there, the trees stop. That is treeline, and what is above it is genuine alpine tundra — the same kind of ground you would find in the Arctic, stranded on a mountaintop in the Southwest at the same latitude as North Africa. The plants up there are tiny, extremely slow-growing and extremely fragile; a boot print in alpine tundra can be visible for years.
It is climbable. It is a serious day hike — long, steep, high, and exposed above treeline where afternoon thunderstorms in July and August are lethal and completely routine. The rule in these mountains is to be off the summit and heading down by noon.
Also up there: bighorn sheep, marmots, ptarmigan, and pika — small round animals that harvest hay and are steadily losing ground as the climate warms up their mountaintop.
Photo: David Herrera from Albuquerque, NM, Bernalillo · CC BY 2.0