Valles Caldera National Park in November
 Valles Caldera is a 13.7-mile wide volcanic caldera in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico. Hot springs, streams, fumaroles, natural gas seeps and volcanic domes dot the caldera floor landscape.
After a nearly 2.5 hour one-way drive from Albuquerque and a back-seat picnic, Katie and I hiked just about 25 minutes in the blustering wind from the parking lot out to a nice outlook that gave us a view of the distant ring of small mountains and hills that now form the ring of what was once a super volcano (or maybe still is? I’m not a geologist).
The views are astounding and beautiful...a massive unearthly grass field in the middle of the rocky and woody regions. I can see why elk love the place. Tiny streams filled with trout and other native fish criss-cross this broad field, and in certain seasons you can enter for a chance to fish in this coveted fly-fishing spot.
Honestly, the photos simply don’t do this place justice. Even with my Canon EF-S 10-18mm lens, the place is beautiful but the scale is impossible to capture.
The reason for the trip was simple: test out my new FT-3DR’s APRS capability with the rubber ducky antenna. Surprisingly, I was able to hit the nearby i-Gate (thank you to KA8JMW-10 for running it)! No digipeater or cross-band repeat necessary. I’m sure in the future I will need to invest in a mobile-rig to do so at my more remote hikes, but for now I’m pleasantly impressed with the system’s ability to log this hike and made it very easy to share the hike with friends and family.