Somewhere up the slope to your right, above the village of San Cristobal, is a small ranch that has an improbable place in English literature.
The writer D.H. Lawrence — author of Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover, one of the most controversial novelists of the twentieth century — spent time on a ranch up there in the nineteen twenties. He was ill, restless, and looking for somewhere that felt alive; he found it here and wrote about New Mexico with real feeling afterwards, calling it the greatest experience he ever had from the outside world.
He died in France in nineteen thirty. And his remains ended up back on that mountainside, in a small white shrine that his widow built — which is a strange final destination for a coal miner's son from Nottinghamshire.
How exactly they got there is a story with more than one version, and Boone will give it to you shortly.
The ranch is owned by the University of New Mexico now, and access has varied over the years — check before you drive up. But the shrine is up there, on the mountain, with the pines around it and a view out over the plain.
Photo: Vivaverdi · CC0