I now probably qualify for card-carrying membership in a whole 'nother order of loonies: yesterday, I heard the Taos Hum (summary, more thorough site). Or something fitting its description, at any rate. I rode up to the top of the Santa Fe ski area's triple lift, at 12,000 feet, and discarded my skis to continue uphill on foot. Fortunately, it's been sunny and windy up there on the crest of the Sangre de Cristos, and I was able, sans snowshoes, to walk on the hardened surfaces of snowdrifts too deep for my ski pole to find a bottom. The constant wind had sculpted the snow quite beautifully, like polished white wood with graceful curving grain. After thrashing through one final, particularly unfriendly drift, I left treeline behind. The upper slopes of Deception Peak usually stay free of snow; there's just rock and sky up there, and the curling orange fronds of the alpine grasses, covered in traceries of ice.

I climbed out some distance on the craggy ridge between Deception and Lake Peaks, and was enjoying the views; giant avalanche bowls on either side of me, the Truchas peaks towering to the North, and the huge mountains of Colorado hulking white on the far horizon. And then I started hearing the Hum, a deep hollow whistle somewhat like the lowest notes on a bass flute, frequently augmented by a rumbling pulsation which is indeed (as so many Hum hearers claim) like a distant diesel engine. The sound was quite distinct and steady and kept going for several minutes at a time. It would go away when I moved and return again, when I found another favourable spot, I suppose. Given the nature of the noise and the context, I have no doubt that I was hearing low frequency sound generated by the constant wind on the knife-edged ridge. Nambé Basin, right below me, is more or less a half-mile-wide, thousand-foot-high parabola, and I wonder if it mightn't have added some resonance. The diesel-engine pulsations seemed to me like the throbbing sounds you get from two slightly different pitches sounding together, like when two guitar strings are not quite in tune.

The West wind is very constant in the spring in New Mexico, and the crest of the Sangres is the highest thing around by a wide margin. From the ski area, we often see the clouds above the ridge spreading vertically into the upper atmosphere as the wind shoots up off the mountains, as though it's hit a ski jump; it's like looking at five-thousand-foot columns of boiling water from below. It would therefore not surprise me if sounds like what I heard sometimes go on for some time, and resonate into odd spots in the mountain valleys. This certainly does not explain all aspects of the Hum reported by chronic sufferers, but it's the only explanation I know of which Occam's Razor leaves intact.