estures around him as
he sa ys, "We know what we valu
e, and we protect
it." He gets a nod of agreement from tribal elder and religiEMRTCous leader Luterio Lucero. The men's eyes are radiant with the fullness of the beauty surrounding them -- Cabezon Peak, the "giant's head," looms on the western horizon, and to the east the Sandia Mountains reflect the last of the morning sun as it transits into the arc of midday.
There is a small movie set nearby, a shepherd's hut built for the film Into the Badlands, later used by other productions.
A scraggy juniper growing close by seems almost defiant in its solitude. The soil here is so heavily laden with gypsum that few plants can survive; the stark, hilly landscape looks like the surface of the moon. Different areas of Zia contribute to its other-worldly persona: Chalky white rock formations rise up in lonely clusters between razorback ridges and basins of cacti and pinon. Murky thermal springs bubble out of the ground in areas patchworked with soils of Martian red and striated yellow, charcoal and cream. The saline Rio Salado winds through uncertain terrain of rolling prairie and deeply carved arroyos.
It's not surprising that this 122,000-acre reservation has been filmed as another planet for the television series Earth 2 and the movie New Eden, that it became Grand Canyon territory for the miniseries The Fire Next Time and that Wyatt Earp used Zia's open range land for a