After breakfast and packing up we head down to the Alamosa National Wildlife Refuge, under a wide and very blue winter sky. The refuge is empty, the Visitor’s Center boarded up, we park and wander down the Rio Grande. Here it is a slow-moving, muddy, turbid affair a few tens of feet across. This area is full of oxbow lakes and paleo-channels. Before agriculture came, before terra-forming, agro-chemicals, and water controls, it must have teeming with birds and other wildlife. We spot a bald eagle on a large cottonwood tree, but it flies on before we can get anywhere near. Loki climbs on the huge stacks of cut hay.
