Larger Image: Valle de la Laborcita
Photo by John Madsen
The captain and his party turned up the Caxon de los Jucaros (Saliz Canyon) then northeast and descended into a piney valley with the Saliz Mountains to their right and the San Francisco Mountains to their left. Zúñiga named the basin bottom the “Valle de la Laborcita”. The valley lies at 6,000 ft elevation and today the landscape is carpeted with stands of ponderosa pine, groves of pinion pine and juniper, and pockets of grassland.
