Tim Brass looks across the horizontal landscape of northern New Mexico’s Rio Grande Plateau, peppered with juniper and mesquite shrubs. The river that named this place is well below us, in a water-scoured canyon, but Brass leads my eye to distant blue shapes out of focus in the shimmering heat.
He’s pointing out the island mountain ranges all around us, high mesas and alpine meadows that are defined by their abrupt rise out of the landscape and by the trees and even snow on their higher slopes. They’re not part of the contiguous San Juan or Sangre de Cristo ranges with their long ridgelines stepping to crenelated peaks and manicured ski runs. Instead,