Bandelier National Monument

Our journey today took us to Bandelier National Monument. On our way we stopped in Santa Fe to drop off Ted's new computer. He had bought a computer that someone had returned that they assured him had been put back to factory settings. The other person's sign on was still there and everything was in Spanish. 

When we got to White Rock, the signs said that we had to take a shuttle to the national monument. We parked at the White Rock Visitors Center and went in to get information and to find out when the shuttles ran. The visitors center had interesting wind driven sculptures in front. The trip to the monument took about twenty-five minutes and the driver gave us information on the area. The mountains we could see out the side of the bus were the edge of a super volcano, one of only a few in the world, and much like the one in Yellowstone only smaller. All the ground for miles and miles is layers of volcanic ash in various colored layers and up to a thousand feet deep.

Visitor Center With Wind Sculptures

Erosion has cut valleys and ravines in the deep layers of ash rock so the road into the monument wound up and down and around the tops of mesas. A few bridges would have made it shorter but would have ruined the landscape so, oh well, sit back and enjoy. As we got nearer, many of the cliffs were really porous, some with big holes that people had actually lived in. When we got to the monument, a ranger met us to explain that the reason we had to take a shuttle was that they have had a series of serious flash floods in the past year and this affected the parking lots. As we wandered around the grounds, we could see the devastation in the path of what today was just a trickle of water in a little stream.

Layers of Volcanic Ash

We watched the film and then went out to take the mile long walk to see the remains of the Ancestral Pueblos and cliff dwellings. There was a mild, misty rain falling when we got outside so we put on windbreakers and started out first passing a large kiva and then the remains of a large pueblo which was probably two stories high and had over four hundred rooms. We have seen many pueblos in the past month or so but what was interesting about Bandelier is the many caves that were made in the side of the cliffs that look like Swiss cheese. There were ladders leading up to some of the openings and we were allowed to climb and enter them. In one, a fairly large kiva had been carved into the rock and we could easily stand in it.

Big Kiva

Large Community

Holy Place

Cliff Dweller

There were many steps up and down to reach the sites along the cliffs. When we got to the end of the cliff dwellings, we crossed the newly made plank bridge that took us to the other side of the once narrow stream, now a wide cut in the valley. By then it was really raining so we decided not to go to Alcove House which was a half mile further on and up a hundred forty feet on ladders. The walk back to the visitors center followed a pretty trail through the woods with yellow leaves and some kind of long needle pine spills falling on us as the wind and rain increased. 

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Was Ted Awake?

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Debris from Flooding

We intended to go through the museum when we got back to the visitors center but there was a shuttle coming and we were wet so we hopped the shuttle back to White Rock. White Rock is next to Los Alamos, New Mexico where the Manhattan Project creating the atomic bomb took place during World War II. The more we travel the more things we find to see. We will definitely have to make another pass through this section of the county. A quick stop in Santa Fe to pick up Ted's computer and we were back at the campground with the sun shining.