by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer

Santa Fe may be turning 400 years old but for all of its history, this is a city that’s also looking toward the future. Nowhere is that more evident than in the city's Railyard District, where  onetime industrial and railroad land about half a mile from the city's historic plaza is being transformed into the 12-acre Railyard Park and Plaza.

It's part of  a 50-acre, $125 million project that will link up the park with the city’s Guadalupe District and new commercial development (an REI will be one of the anchors), as well as a concentration of contemporary art galleries and cultural venues, a farmers market space, and nearby residences.

Weather problems this winter and spring slowed work on the park but a grand opening celebration is still set for September 12-14. I got a sneak preview of the park thanks to Brian Drypolcher, project director for the Trust for Public Land, the organization that helped acquire the land and that is directing the design and construction work on the park and plaza. Landscape architect Ken Smith (who is also designing the ambitious Orange County Great Park) created the park’s plan.

What is striking about the site is how it both diverges from prevailing impressions of Santa Fe while integrating aspects of the city’s history and traditions. Instead of taking its lead from the city’s Pueblo Revival style, the Railyards draws its inspiration and look from the property’s railroad and industrial history. Materials such as train car wheel assemblies and recycled rails edging walkways will be incorporated into the park and a circular ramada will recall the railway turntable once located on the property.

But the parcel is no hardscape, not with trumpet vine destined to grow on a trellis covering walkways, orchards of fruit trees, and a newly planted cottonwood bosque-in-training. Water for a community garden will come from the Acequia Madre, the 400-year-old irrigation system that runs through the property, and an innovative harvesting system designed to capture runoff from 3.7 acres of rooftops will supply 60-70 percent of the park’s water needs.

Even as work continues on the park, elements of the larger project are coming together. Warehouse 21, an arts and cultural center for teens and young people, opened in late June and the farmers market is set to start on August 2. The Railrunner commuter train should begin service between Albuquerque and Santa Fe by the end of the year.

Some have likened the Railyards to a Santa Fe plaza for the next millennium.  And it will certainly be fascinating to see how both locals and visitors make this new and alternative vision of Santa Fe their own. For now, says Drypolcher, the reaction is quite simple: “Wow, holy smokes, it’s really happening.”   

By Amy Wolf, Sunset travel editor

My family never did the reunion thing, and I sort of feel like I got gypped. I always envy the families who all get together for weeks on end of days at the beach, big group dinners al fresco, parents lounging by the bonfire with cocktails in hand while the kids tromp around content to be with their cousins. I barely even knew who my cousins were, let alone spent frivolous weeks away with them.

Now that I have my own kids, not to mention 13 neices and nephews, I'm dying to plan a reunion someday. The good news is that I recently stumbled upon the absolute perfect place to do it.

Westerbeke Ranch, in Sonoma Valley, minutes from dowtown Sonoma, is a rustic, family-run retreat that bills itself as a conference center but welcomes groups of any kind: 16 people minimum on weekdays, 21 people minimum weekends, 52 people total. Rates are on a sliding scale (cheapest for bigger groups), starting at $141 per person per night, including THREE meals a day! The food is supposedly excellent, featuring produce grown on the grounds, and the ranch kitchen is very inviting, with al fresco seating by a pool. Just think of all the money you save not eating out. And you don’t even have to cook, let alone walk more than 10 paces from your cabin.

The five redwood cabins have single beds only, but they’re plenty comfy in a summer-camp way, with country-style furnishings and porch swings outside. The place exudes summertime laziness, which might explain why I snoozed the whole afternoon away in one of those cabins recently.

I felt like I was entering the Sunset Magazine headquarters as I walked around the Spanish Mission–style property with its lushly landscaped gardens, oak-dotted hillsides, adobe buildings with Taco Bell–syle roofs, even a few cacti here and there. It’s an appropriate likeness, since the ranch is steeped in western heritage, having been built by a western couple in 1935 and occupied by four different generations of that same family since then.

Members of the family still live on the grounds, tending their vegetable gardens, driving cool old trucks around dirt roads, and living the western life we all like to dream of living someday. The same family also owns the very lovely looking El Rito Canyon Retreat in northern New Mexico; Oak Hill Farm in Sonoma County’s Mayacamas Mountains, which sells its produce and flowers at the San Francisco Ferry Builing Ferry Farmers Market; and Bucklin Winery, which produces an excellent zinfandel.

Like I said, I wish I had that kind of family. But at least the rest of us can go stay at the ranch, eat the produce, drink the wine, and dream.

by Matthew Jaffe, Sunset senior writer

For a week during our trip to New Mexico, my wife Becky and I and just about everyone else in the state, awaited the arrival of the summer monsoons.

Each day the skies would threaten, as massive anvil-shaped clouds formed over the mountains. Walk into restaurants or shops, and invariably we would be asked:

“Get wet yet?”

And the answer was always no: couple drops on the windshield, maybe. Not even enough to quench a scorpion's thirst.

(At this point, especially for anyone who lives outside the Southwest, it may be important to first explain that yes, New Mexico does get monsoons, and to further explain what they are. Which we will leave to the good folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

“A monsoon is generally defined as a seasonal variation of wind, cloud cover and precipitation that is controlled by the annual cycle of the sun. In climates that are strongly influenced by monsoons, most of the annual precipitation is received during the monsoon season.
Portions of the southwest United States, including New Mexico, are influenced by the North American Monsoon System (NAMS), which is also referred to as the Southwest Monsoon. Many locations in New Mexico receive 40 to 50 percent of the annual precipitation during the period from July 1 through August 31…”

Or as I understand it, moist air flows in from Mexico, gets lifted 50,000 feet or so into the sky by hot air rising off the desert and mountains, and forms those big clouds, which eventually can’t hold all the moisture.)

Walking around Santa Fe last Monday, which was June 30 and hence, climatologically speaking, Monsoon Eve, the day hardly looked promising for rain. But by early afternoon, while we were checking out one of the contemporary art installations in Lucky Number Seven, the Site Santa Fe's 2008 biennial (that rope-like adornment on the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum is among the works), the skies began to look more ominous.

The light was beautiful: bright on the ground here in the courtyard behind the museum, deepening purple above the mountains.

Which is where we were staying, roughly at 8,000 feet. at the spa resort, Ten Thousand Waves. Becky and I had visited Ten Thousand Waves a few winters ago and savored a 104 degree soak among the pinon pines and juniper in the middle of a snowstorm. We reminisced about how beautiful that day had been and how we needed to come back again in winter.

No need. Instead winter, or at least a summer semblance of it, came to us. The rains began as we drove the road up into the Sangre de Cristos and by the time we reached our room, it started to hail. And hail. And hail some more.

We were now essentially somewhere inside the clouds that we had seen from town. Soon the ground was white, covered by a half inch or so of hail. Muddy cascades ran down the steps to our room and we later found a half-frozen snake buried in the ice.

That snake’s timing could have been better but with the monsoons right on schedule and the spa’s New Ofuro tub already reserved, ours was perfect. A soak, a sauna, and then treatments: Becky went for a massage while I opted for a facial that included a traditional geisha cleansing masque made from processed nightingale droppings. I am not only enlightened but now aglow.

By the time we returned to the room, the storm had passed, the snake had thawed out, and it was cool enough to light a fire.  We listened to the burning logs crackle in rhythm with the steady drip of melting hail.