Lower Winsor Trail Hike – 08/19/2018 - Hiking in New Mexico (NMHiking.com)

This late summer we’re exploring trails close to Santa Fe. For starters, we chose this start of the Winsor Trail as it runs up the canyon of the Tesuque River. Parking is very limited, alongside a narrow residential road off of Bishops Lodge Road.

The Hike

Winsor Hike.Jay.2018-08-19

The trail continues on up the road for about 2/3 of a mile, between fences for private property on both sides. One then leaves the road behind for a -real- trail that proceeds up Tesuque Canyon, alongside Big Tesuque Creek. At about 1.2 miles into the hike, we encountered a bridge on which we crossed over to the north (left) side of the creek; we did note a trail that continued up the south side of the creek (later we used it to make a bit of a loop). This would appear to be a trail that is heavily used, so the trail surface made hiking easy throughout. Down deep in the canyon, there are no vista views, but the trail is shaded most of the time which made the hike comfortably cool.

Jay here: Santa Fe environs sure have a multitude of hiking options and just about all of them beat the summer heat. Hiking along a shaded stream most of the way out is what we call refreshing. And hiking at 7,000 plus feet in elevation is also a change of pace for us given that a lot of our hikes start around 5,800 feet and rarely get to more than 7,000 feet.

Statistics

Total Distance: 5.33 miles
Elevation: start 6,987 ft, maximum 7,665 ft, minimum 6,987 ft
Gross gain: 678 ft. Aggregate ascending ft, descending ft
Maximum slope: 26% ascending, 23% descending, 5.3% average
Duration: 3:53