2012/06 Western USA trip - Bandelier |
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Friday June 23rd
Next morning we drove through the lava beds for miles. We joined the I-25 freeway to make good time on our way north. We were heading for Bandelier national monument, about which I knew very little except that it had Indian ruins and it was about the right distance away.
We crossed desert hills on our way to the flat valley that surrounds Albuquerque, a pleasant looking city, one of the oldest in the area, as it began as a Spanish outpost. The next city on the road is Santa Fe, reputed to be beautiful with its adobe themed architecture, but we missed all that as we started the climb up to Los Alamos, famous in the atomic age as the home of the Manhattan Project that designed the bomb.
We found that the only way to get to the Bandelier site was a long shuttle bus ride from town, but, as campers, we were able to drive to the campground and pick up the shuttle from there. We had a couple of hours to visit the ruins in Frijoles Canyon, more than enough on a 90+ afternoon.
The park buildings were surrounded by sandbags. There had been a major fire which killed most of the trees in the upper canyon and since then there’s been nothing to slow the water flow and there have been flash floods. The old campground on the 
creek’s edge has been abandoned. The one we were at is above the canyon.
The rock in the area is tuff, compressed volcanic ash. The people carved the harder bits into bricks for their pueblos and kivas and carved the softer canyon walls into cave dwellings.
The area was abandoned about five hundred years ago. We spent the afternoon climbing steps up to the terraces and ladders up into the caves, and looking for pictographs. It must have been a strange landscape even before the humans worked on it, but 
now it was really weird. From high on the cliffs we could look down and see the floor plan of the buildings in the valley.
We walked back to the shuttle along Frijoles Creek, glad of the shade under the cottonwoods. Back at the campground we found that there were two other teardrop trailers there, not Little Guys but similar.