Pinyon, Juniper & the Middle Country — a stop on the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway.
The forest has changed around you — the tall pines are behind us, and now it's shorter, scrubbier, more open: pinyon pine and juniper, the classic middle-elevation woodland of the Southwest.
Both trees are worth knowing. The junipers are the shaggy, twisted, grey-green ones with berry-like cones — which are not berries, and which are what gives gin its flavour. They are extraordinarily tough, they can live many centuries, and a dead one will stand as silver driftwood for another century after that.
The pinyon is the small, rounded pine, and it produces one of the great wild foods of North America: pine nuts. Real pinyon nuts are rich, oily and delicious, and they have been a staple food for Indigenous peoples of the Southwest for thousands of years. The trees only produce a heavy crop every few years, and when they do, whole families still turn out to gather them.
This woodland is also where you start seeing different birds — the pinyon jay, which travels in enormous noisy flocks and caches seeds by the thousand, and which is largely responsible for planting the next generation of pinyon trees.
Keep descending. The country is about to change character completely one more time.