About the Image(s)

The Caldera

Another must-see area in northern New Mexico is the Valles Caldera National Preserve. We visited the preserve on October 31, 2020.
I took this photo with my Canon 7D and 17??”40/4L lens at 17mm. Exposure: f/11 at 1/250 sec, set manually with spot metering. In post processing, I set the profile to camera-matching landscape, increased the exposure ever so slightly, added some contrast, brought the highlights down and the shadows up, and set the black and white points to ensure no clipping in the histogram. In the color sliders, I set the white balance temperature to the daylight preset (5,500), tint +7, vibrance +18 and saturation +5. (Thanks to the feedback I’ve gotten previously in this group, I’ve throttled back my use of both the saturation and vibrance sliders greatly.) Other adjustments include the effects sliders: texture +23, clarity +29, and dehaze +7. In the curve section I brought the highlights and lights down and the darks and shadows up, resulting in a slight “S” curve to give the image a tad more contrast. Now, more about this visually rewarding place…
Located in the Jemez Mountains, the 88,900-acre park encompasses almost all of the volcanic caldera created by a spectacular eruption about 1.2 million years ago. The caldera is dormant, but not extinct, and still displays signs of volcanic life with hot springs and boiling sulphuric acid fumaroles.
The juxtaposition of large grassland meadows, or valles in Spanish, surrounded by rounded, forest-covered volcanic domes provides the distinctive natural landscape that led to the name of Valles Caldera. Walking around on the trails in the caldera, it truly stretches the imagination to think just how big that volcano must have been.
The park ranges from 8,000 feet up to 11,254 feet high at the top of Redondo Peak. It supports a great diversity of animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms, including several thousand elk and healthy populations of mountain lions, bears, and coyotes. ??For thousands of years, American Indians have used the caldera for hunting, fishing, and gathering various plants for food, medicine, and ceremonies. The signature resource for these indigenous peoples was obsidian, and tools found across the United States were made from obsidian gathered here. Numerous American Indian tribes and pueblos in the region have deep historic and cultural connections to the caldera.
Thank you to the National Park Service for creating the above information about the Valles Caldera National Preserve that I have adapted here. You can learn more about this unique treasure in New Mexico at https://www.nps.gov/vall/index.htm. If you value places like this managed by the National Park Service and our other federal natural resources agencies, then let your Congressional representatives know it. In February alone, more than 1,000 National Park Service employees were terminated.