Balloon Rides and Taos Mesa from Above

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I know, I know.  I keep coming back to photos from my hot air balloon rides but I just find the landforms fascinating when looked at from the air. Sorry if I’m boring you. As I wrote nearly a year ago:

Humans had not, as far as we know, seen the Earth from above prior to the first balloon flights. Before the intrepid Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier had taken to the sky in the Montgolfier’s aerostat, it was thought that human flight would reveal the secrets of the heavens. In fact, the secrets of the world below were laid bare and a new understanding of the Earth as a single, massive organism took hold in the mind of the pilots and those who could comprehend the drawings made from thousands of feet up.

The relationship of humanity and nature was also revealed in a new way. Towns marching into the countryside, a forest swallowing and abandoned farm, the differences and similarities of roads and rivers and the black acrid puff of the birth of industrialization.

[snip]

Shelly, having just witnessed the 1811 launch of a balloon from Christchurch Meadows exclaimed a desire for balloons to open the world to knowledge of itself and the vision that ballooning would “emancipate every slave” and “annihilate slavery forever.”

These pictures were taken two weeks ago on a flight that took us from the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Arroyo Hondo at John Dunn Bridge (below) and then south along the Rio Grande Gorge to just east of the “high bridge” . The human impact on what appears to be, on the surface, a relitively untouched landscape are so evident from above.

Other shots from other flights are here, here, here and here.

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