Bandelier National Monument

Today we drove out for a spectacular visit to Bandelier National Monument, near Los Alamos, about an hour's drive from our campground.  Bandelier comprises over 33,000 acres of ground on the Pajarito Plateau, in the shadows of the Jemez Mountains, and adjoining the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Bandelier is known for its preservation of homes and artifacts of the Ancestral Pueblos who lived in the area, and particularly in Frijoles Canyon, during the period from AD 600 to AD 1600.  The entire monument area contains thousands of archaeological sites.  Many bear pictographs and petroglyphs.

The specific pueblo preserved and available for easy access from the Bandelier visitor center is  the village of Tyuonyi (pronounced QU-weh-nee), which consisted of a large, circular adobe construction with a round central plaza in which three circular below-ground chambers called kivas are located.  In addition, some families in the community lived in caves in the surrounding mountain cliffs.  Some of the caves were further excavated by the native Americans (and, hence are called caveates).  Many also were supplemented by adobe rooms constructed in front of and attached to the caves so that the caves functioned as adjunct rooms to the adobe structures.  The residences could be 1, 2 or 3 floors in height.  All buildings had entrances on their roofs.

Here is a view of Tyuonyi from the nearby cliff:

Here is a photo of Kathy standing beside what remains of a very large kiva.  When it was used, it had a circular, dome-shaped roof made of adobe or mud, with a square opening at the top through which people entered.

Some of Bandelier's cliff dwellings are accessible by ladders constructed by the National Park Service.  Here is Kathy looking out of a caveate from atop a ladder:

The insides of the cave rooms could be very spacious.  Often the interior walls were plastered and then decorated.  The ceilings were almost universally blackened from the soot of interior fires.  Archaeologists have since determined that the carbonization may also have incidentally stabilized the tuff (old volcanic ash turned to rock) in which the caveates were carved.  Kathy is in the center of a 3-room residence:

Many of the pueblo houses have pictographs (painted art or designs) or petroglyphs (carved or etched art or designs) on the cliff walls above the level of what would have been the roofs of the dwellings.  There is one pictographs that has been well-preserved:

Up Frijoles Canyon from the main part of the village is a large cliff dwelling built over 140 feet above the canyon floor and which the NPS has dubbed the "Alcove House."  It is accessible to those who are willing to climb the 140 feet by way of ladders and narrow trails carved out of the tuff walls of the cliffs:

We only walked a very small fraction of the over 70 miles of trails in Bandelier.  Even so, we encountered some unexpected wildlife.  Here is a mule deer we surprised as she was licking salts off a large rock.  She was aware of us and cautious, but we were quiet and she did not run from us.  After watching a while and taking some photos, we passed on and she continued licking salt.

Coming back along the trail from the Alcove House, we were paralleling Frijoles Creek.  We happened to turn and see a coyote, out in mid-day, as he walked along the stream bed.  By the time we got the camera out and photographed him, he had already started moving away from us, but we got a very clear view of him as he first turned and looked at us - perhaps not more than 10 yards away!

Valles Caldera National Preserve is also a spectacular natural area.  It is what remains of an ancient volcano that erupted and then collapsed, leaving a huge, 13.7 miles wide caldera, or large round valley.  It has many miles of ranch roads, livestock and game trails available for hiking.

Nearby is the town of Los Alamos and the famous Los Alamos National Laboratory.  We stopped in town for lunch at the Pajarito Brewpub & Grill, then toured the Bradbury Science Museum, which memorializes the history of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Los Alamos Historical Museum, which recounts the history of the Los Alamos area, including its use prior to World War II for Ranch School, an elite boys school founded in 1917 and closed down when the U.S. Government forcibly acquired the property to build the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1940's.