Chama River Canyon Wilderness, Continental Divide

I’ve begun the last stage of my New Mexico journey as I wander through the Chama River Canyon Wilderness, home to one of the USA’s most important modernist painters, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). I’ve always enjoyed O’Keeffe’s paintings; they first appear to your eye almost as abstract forms until you realise you’re looking at a flower, a mountain or a sunset. With her sumptuous colours and the fluid contours of her brushstrokes, she painted her feelings into nature, infusing her emotional and psychological state with the landscapes and flowers she used as her subjects, creating expressive canvases that truly captured her own personal New Mexico.

And O’Keeffe adored New Mexico. First visiting in 1929, she quickly fell in love with the state. She made her final move to nearby Abiqui in 1949, buying a house named Ghost Ranch built in the mudbrick adobe style of the Pueblo people. The property is a chic blend of modern design and heritage building styles. Its weathered wooden doors and simple adobe forms work brilliantly with the airy courtyards and large windows overlooking the deserts and mountains.

Walking here, one can spot some of the greatest hits of O’Keeffe’s work in the wild. As I follow the trail, a constant presence is the Cerro Pedernal, a large, lonely mountain. The artist called it ‘her mountain’, saying that she had painted it so many times, God had promised it to her. Now clad in the greens of early summer, it really resembles one of her most famous paintings, ‘My Front Yard, Summer’, an image of the lush fertility of Cerro Pedernal, contrasting with the rocky desert mesas.

As I climbed through the red-rock landscape, the desert opened out into a plain, and I saw, right next to the trail, a ram’s skull. Bleached brilliant white by the sun, it reminded me of one of O’Keeffe’s favourite motifs, an image that featured in many of her most striking works. The undulating hills that surrounded me brought her painting “Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills” especially to life, where the ghostly figure of the skull dominates a foreboding grey sky, floating at the top of the canvas, a white hollyhock flower beside, a line of sunset-bathed hills stretching beneath. I held the skull up to the sky, mine clear blue and cloud-streaked today, in an attempt to imitate the painting.

Then, I look to the distance, at the mountains of the New Mexico-Colorado border looming, promising fresh adventures and new starts. The contrast between the dark blues and blacks of the mountain peaks, and the reds and browns of the desert mesas near me brings straight to mind O’Keeffe’s ‘Black Mesa landscape, New Mexico/ Out Back of Marie’s II’. This was one of O’Keeffe’s first New Mexico landscapes, painted in 1930, just after her first visit to the state. O’Keeffe may not have known it at the time, but this was a painting of promise - a first look at a new frontier that would change her life, the landscapes that would define her work, and the region that she would come to love as her own. I share the feeling, the distant mountains promising a new chapter in my hike, as I head towards Cumbres Pass, gateway to Colorado, land of peak and forest.

PS: for copyright reasons, I can’t reproduce images of O’Keeffe’s wonderful paintings here, but here’s a list of those mentioned above if you’d like to take a look yourself:

My Front Yard, Summer (1941)

Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills (1935)

Black Mesa landscape, New Mexico/ Out Back of Marie’s II (1930)