One of the highlights of the GSRT2024 was hiking Mt Taylor outside Grants, New Mexico.
Grants is a small town about 80 miles west of Albuquerque and you can see Mt Taylor from the latter.
I took the Gooseberry Trail and it's just 6 miles with 2000' of gain. The trail is in good shape and it starts out fairly easy to follow and then turns into hard-to-miss. There's tree cover at the start of the hike and on the summit, but the middle section is largely bare so that section wouldn't be a good place to be in a thunderstorm. After the middle section there were switchbacks that I thought were going to end at the summit, but the summit is actually another few hundred feet higher.
I did this on a weekday and there was no one else anywhere that I could see. I saw evidence of cows and there's a couple of cow gates, but I didn't see any cows either. I did see a couple of deer on the road and a large raptor circling above the peak. Plus, lots and lots of crickets in the meadow-y parts.
