Pinon and I atop the Trailrider's Wall (approximately 12,000 feet) on the northern edge of the Pecos Wilderness this weekend. You can see the Truchas Peaks behind us. We were above the treeline and hoping to see the mountain sheep. I've heard stories about them for years--how they will walk right up to you and try to lick the salty sweat from your horse. I suspect the opinionated Pinon would not have been too keen on that... She would have thrown that head up in the air, rolled her eyes, and snorted in indignation. Maybe even given one a good drop kick over the edge and puffed up with satisfaction at the wooly critter's bleating. (Do mountain sheep land on their feet like my barn cats?) But the Forest Service was relocating the sheep herd via helicopter on Saturday. So this is what we saw of them.

The sheep were literally swinging from bags on a cord be beneath the helicopter, way above the mountain. Three at a time. All you could see were sheep heads sticking out of the bags.

It had rained on us pretty good at Baldy Lake.

By the time we hit the beginning of the Trailrider's wall, we were a good five hours into our 12-hour ride. As we started up the wall, we ran into three deer--a doe, a fawn and a young buck. They mustn't see many people up there, because they stopped and stared at us from about 20 feet away. And they seemed more curious than scared. You could read it all over their bodies, the way they seemed torn between leaping off into the pine and planting their hooves on solid ground to give us a good once over. They had huge brown eyes, large ears that they flicked in our direction, and coats that were golden. I'm not exaggerating--they were kind of a golden yellow. No boring brown for these guys. Pinon was transfixed. Enchanted. I think she would have followed them off into the wild if I'd given her her head. She might have dumped me and gone off to join the herd. You catch glimmers of the something very wild and primal inside of your horse when you get up into this kind of country. Occasionally you even get lucky and feel it reflected in yourself and all of a sudden you realize it is inside of you too. You'd like to follow the deer as well if it meant you could spend your life in these high, wild, and windswept places.

Pinon has a penchant for walking along the very edge of the trail, not the middle, and not the top, the edge. And she kind of sniffs the trail out like a 1,000 pound hound dog. So in between my bouts of vertigo up on the wall and this sense that the whole world was tilting beneath her four hooves (at that point I got off and walked), I noticed that the scrubby and very wild yellow roses that grow up there were covered in raindrops. Whenever the sun would peek out from behind the growling and grumbling thunder clouds above, more raindrops than you or I could count would twinkle like stars on the leaves, branches and yellow petals. Like stars fallen to the ground and that just happened to get hung up on some scraggly roses growing out of the rock. Shards of light in roses and rock, momentarily earthbound. Gives you the feeling that you've just barely scratched the surface of this place.

By the time we reached here (The Trailrider's Wall is that last mountaintop in the distance. Yes, we covered some ground), the trail was a bog.

Black, deep mud sucked at our boots and at the horse's hooves. The roar of a high mountain creek reverberated off of the canyon walls as we made our descent to Beatty's cabin to the aspen trees and the Pecos River, and still three more hours to go. I hung onto the saddlehorn as Pinon carried me down the final snarl of switchbacks, feeling a little goofy because I was so tired, and thankful the opinionated mare's so darned strong and has this huge, adventurous heart along with a strong sense of self-preservation. She's a mountain horse.

We arrived back at base camp just a little shy of 8PM. I was very relieved to be back at semi-civilization before dark while the silly part of me had been secretly wishing I'd get to see the stars shining above Round Mountain.

But I did see them on the scraggly yellow roses that had managed to thrive above the treeline, where sheep fly and the deer are made of gold.