A Walk Around the Horizon : Discovering New Mexico's Mountains of the Four Directions

North of Santa Fe, the New Mexico landscape is framed by four high mountains. Sacred to the Tewa Pueblo Indians, these peaks sit in different bureaucratic and cultural zones, which means that while each attracts visitors, few non-Indian travelers venture to more than one.

Tom Harmer's chronicle of climbing all four mountains in one summer—Sandia to the south, Chicoma to the west, Canjilon to the north, and Truchas to the east—offers a unique view of a montane forest unlike any in the world, where mountain, plain, and desert biota converge.

Outdoor enthusiasts and armchair travelers alike will relish Harmer's precise account of his backpacking adventure, in which this sixty-two-year-old discovers the realities of complicated cultural legacies, ecological challenges, and human foibles counterpoised against his own strengths and frailties.