Author: leh

Albuquerque — even before Breaking Bad and Walter White — was an interesting place and made for a relatively easy weekend trip from the Reservation. I visited several times, once for a national conference on Indian issues, once to attend the then-fledgling international hot air balloon festival and often just to play and photograph. I just came upon a few photos, but couldn’t seem to locate many of the balloon event. Then I realized that I must have photographed those activities in color, as befitting the nature of the festival. And my color work — while representing images perhaps in the few thousands, as compared to the tens of thousands of my work in black & white — is almost wholly disorganized into poorly marked boxes and shelves. And I even found a batch of old slides loosely collected in a plastic grocery bag.

Anyway, here is the first of what should become a considerable series of New Mexico photographs made during the Arizona Apache era.

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During my assignment at the White Mountain Apache Reservation, the risk of cabin fever sometimes ran high. When opportunity in the form of travel-appropriate weather and four day weekends and a must-see concert or the like came up, both Arizona and New Mexico offered some temporary getaway destinations. The Reservation was about equidistant — around four or five hours each — from Phoenix and Albuquerque, so either was on the radar. (I made several trips to N.M., not only Albuquerque but Santa Fe and Taos as well, and will probably uncover photographic evidence of such travel in my archives.) Phoenix was fairly well known to me, as I had lived there for a few months in the late 60s on other GAO assignments, and of course, I always passed through on my trips to and from Los Angeles from the Reservation. Here are some photos from a couple of days in Phoenix (I once considered making a special photographic study of the quaint motels in that area, among other subjects) and its closely surrounding desert:

Driving east for two hundred or so miles, through the desert and on through national forest, we could finally arrive at my new home-away-from-home in the tiny town of Pinetop:

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