Natural Perspectives: Adventures in snowy Albuquerque

Generally, Vic and I try to avoid flying into the midst of a natural disaster. But sometimes it just happens.

If you recall, I was caught in a tornado in April in Tennessee, near Knoxville. Golf ball-sized hail totaled my rental car with hundreds of dents on the hood, fenders and sides, and cracked the windshield. I was terrified, but physically unscathed.

By the time Vic arrived the next day, the weather had cleared. We enjoyed delightful weather on the rest of our trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But because Vic missed out on the tornado, Mother Nature prepared yet another weather-related adventure for us.

Did you read the headlines last week about the family who was trapped in a snowdrift in New Mexico for two days? That family wasn't us, but it could have been.

Vic and I flew into Albuquerque in the midst of what their local newscasters called the snowstorm of the decade. We were still there when another major snowstorm hit a few days later.

Our reason for going to Albuquerque had nothing to do with the weather. I had always wanted to see the Christmas lights there because they're something special.

On Christmas Eve, many residents line their sidewalks, stucco walls and flat rooflines with brown paper lunch bags filled with sand. They place a candle in each sack and light the candles at dusk. They call these luminarias.

Each individual bag is a humble sight, but block after city block of them is breathtaking. People come from all over the world to see the display.

Naturally, we didn't know what the weather was going to be when we made our flight reservations weeks in advance of our trip. We just figured that it would be cold, so we packed accordingly. Turned out that we flew into Albuquerque in the midst of a blizzard, with howling winds and significant snow accumulation.

Landing an airplane in such a storm must take a lot of skill and experience. But I figured that the pilot didn't want to die either, and that we would turn back to Phoenix if conditions weren't safe. That's not exactly what happened.

As we approached Albuquerque, our pilot announced that conditions at the airport "don't meet our minimums for landing."

He told us that we would be circling for a while, stacked with all of the other planes that couldn't land. That was a new term for us.

"Not meeting our minimums" apparently meant that if we tried to land, we'd probably crash. How comforting.