credits - Anthony Falbo - Falboarts.com
The plateau at first glance seems to be entirely free of wildlife. There are miles of nothing but sagebrush and native grasses no taller than your waist. You can scan from horizon to horizon and see little but a few hawks, crows and mountain bluebirds that thrive in the New Mexican desert. But the birds presence tells the true story. Where there are crows, and especially hawks, you know that wildlife thrives below.
Up until this point we’ve been using an old bladed driveway that the previous owner cut to his building site. Since the little road led us directly to the shed, we kept on using it as a starting point for all of our activities. Now that our focus has shifted to the new house site we came to the point where we needed to put in a real driveway.
The plateau has a remarkably diverse set of landscapes from the heavily forested ridge-lines to quasi-desert mesa. The mesa is considered desert by some because of its lack of vegetation (read trees)but its anything but deserted. The land holds many types of shrubs and grasses, and even in this fairly dry place (less than 15″ rain per year) there are still the occasional oak and pine trees in low lying areas.