Embudo Canyon Hike Albuquerque's East Side

    Audio Player   Our country is now on  ” lock down. ” I’ve never been through a government ordered lock down where businesses are shut down, movement is restricted, banks are closed except for drive up windows or internet banking, and the real economy grinds to a halt as the stock market tries to reach it’s old- new heights. One of the few things we are still permitted to do, before we are fined for being on the road, if we don’t have our papers in order, is hike in the Embudo Canyon in the Sandia Mountains. The gate has still opened at seven in the morning and people are still coming to meet nature, in person, in their back yard. People are cautious with the new  ” social distancing ” orders from our state capitol building. On the trail, some hikers wear masks, and back ten feet away from us as we pass them on the same trail we have been hiking for the last several years. Some people you pass don’t even answer you when you greet them with a cheerful ” Good Morning. ” When you are not a billionaire, you can’t escape this new reality as easily,you can’t take a private jet to your private bunker in New Zealand or Australia,you can’t play the stock market casino with someone else’s money.  It’s a great morning for a hike and Albuquerque, from up here, looks like it always does, from a distance. It makes me wonder about the sanity of a “lock down.” For most of us, at ground level, the health of the economy is always life, or death. Is saving 2% of a population worth crippling the other 98%? What would Spock say?