Angle Peak Scenic Area: general Information, geology, and stuff about the drone footage and video.

Angel Peak Scenic Area is in the southern portion of the San Juan Basin and is easily

accessible from US highway 550. Located about 20 miles Southeast of Bloomfield New Mexico and a 120 miles NW of Albuquerque, there is a nice viewpoint/picnic area about a mile down a dirt road (CR 7175) with two more covered picnic areas further down that same road.

Continue down that same dirt road for another 5 miles and you find yourself at a nice BLM campground. This campground has bathrooms and nine sites but no water or electric hookups. The campsite is free and on a first come first served basis, but I have never seen more than a couple of the sites occupied so availability is likely. Day time temperatures in the summer can be hot commonly reaching into the upper nineties.

The road (CR 7175) is gravel with some washer board and a bit bumpy, but easily accessible by 2-wheel drive vehicles. If you have a four-wheel drive vehicle there are roads that traverse the entirely of the angle peak scenic area but be careful. If it rains the famous San Juan Basin mud will trap you if your tires are not great and you don’t have chains.

The surface geology of the Angle Peak Scenic area consists of fluvial non-marine sandstone and mudstone (a mixture of sand and shale) of the San Jose formation. The San Jose Formation dates to the Early Eocene, or about 56 – 47 million years ago, about 10 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs. Fossil fishes, birds, reptiles, and some of the earliest North American Mammals have been collected from the San Jose Formation. The San Jose Formation is the youngest preserved sediments of the San Juan Basin, whose beginning dates to the Early Cretaceous period.

If you are driving up to Durango from Albuquerque, I highly recommend a quick stop at the first picnic area for break with a beautiful view especially around sunset or sunrise.

For those interested in the video here is some information regarding the drone and the footage I took. The drone I used for this video was a DJI Mavic Air 2. I shot in what is called HDR mode that basically does all the color correction itself. I flew this drone and shot this footage on two different days, one day was sunny day in the middle of the afternoon, and the other day was cloudy day near sunset. I shot in 4k at 24 fps. The drone can shoot at 60 fps which makes for really crisp video, but I wanted to shoot at the slower 24 fps to see what that effect had. Movement is better shown in 24 fps as background is blurrier as the drone flys. Overall though I think I like 60 fps better which is what the Simon’s canyon video was shot at. The editing was done using the software program Davinci Resolve.