Open Space Visitors Center & Cranes

To celebrate Boxing Day, the kids and I paid a visit to the Albuquerque Open Space Visitors Center, a new facility housing information about the city’s open space in the foothills, along the river bosque, and in the west mesa petroglyphs. The center is a renovated house on the western edge of the bosque, near farmland and trials. On Monday I visited the city’s website and saw that migratory sandhill cranes were in the fields near the center, so we went by today.


The courtyard outside the visitors center is decorated to represent the Rio Grande running through the state, with rock outcroppings representing the mountain ranges of the region. Three cone-shaped hills represent volcanic field in the western portion of the state. Each of the kids sat atop a volcano and slid down.

We then visited the overlook to the west of the open field where nearly 200 cranes and several dozen ducks frolicked. Here the kids pose in front of the cranes (the cranes are the small dots in the background).

We also paused to see the Arbol de la Vida—the Tree of Life. This sculpture was carved into the standing trunk of a lighting-struck cottonwood, decorated with reliefs of the native wildlife of New Mexico.