Earth’s Natural Wonders – Mexico
The modern world with its pressures, hectic pace and burgeoning cities makes many of us long for a simpler life in touch with the earth’s natural wonders. Maybe that explains our ever-growing fascination with the American Southwest.
Nowhere does the earth present a more consistently dramatic repertoire of sights and experiences. In north-western Arizona, the Colorado River Canyon, a vision still capable of rendering the most sophisticated travelers dumbstruck. To the north and east, the Colorado Plateau encompasses not only the Grand Canyon but the megalithic sculptures of Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park and Monument Valley, and the sheer cliff sides of Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly.
Two hundred miles to the south stretches the austerely beautiful Sonoran Desert, its arid vastness punctuated by jagged peaks and saguaro cactuses, whose forms possess a noble, near-human presence. North to south through New Mexico, the southern trailings of the Rockies cleave the state in half, as the Rio Grande descends from high mountain valleys to low basins of rich, fertile soil. At the Southwest’s easternmost extremes, the Great Plains sweep down across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, breaking up into the precipitous bluffs of the Llano Estacado. And where Texas meets Mexico, the Rio Grande marks the boundary between two countries.
The spell cast by the Southwest today is also partly due to its distinctive foods. Southwestern cuisine captures, in microcosm, the appeal of the vast region: corn tortillas and boiled pinto beans, as rugged and earthy as the desert; fresh and dried chilies, as searing as the sun overhead: piñon nuts harvested from wild piñon trees whose smoke scents the air of New Mexico; meat and game seared over glowing coals of wood from mesquite trees, whose gnarled forms decorate almost every vista.
