On Wednesday, August 6, we departed at 8:30 a.m. after breakfast at the hotel. We stopped for gas and at Albertson’s grocery down the street to buy a picnic lunch and drove to Bandelier National Monument, elevation 6066 feet, about 50 miles northwest of Santa Fe. We arrived at 9:45 a.m. and took a guided walk to the pueblo excavations and then climbed along the cliff into the cavates the Pueblo people built into the volcanic tuff wall of the mesa.
The park ranger on our tour said the park is named for amateur archeologist Adolphe Bandelier who excavated sites in the Frijoles Canyon in the 1880s. Park buildings were constructed by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
I understand the CCC also installed the stairways and railings that allow easy access to the cliff sites, for which I am grateful.
Archeologists are currently working in the canyon, meticulously removing cement from an earlier reconstruction of the Tyuonyi (chew-OHN-yee) village – which I think is a granary, not a village.
We saw an excavated kiva, notable for its central stone from which the ancestral people emerged into the world – a kind of umphalos. I thought this had a nice resonance for Alisa who had seen the umphalos at Delphi years before.
I know that I am shallow to prefer the pristine presentation at Bandelier to a more gritty reality, but I can only appreciate what I can understand. I loved this place and hope to return.
We had our picnic in the park upon our return from the cliff, and departed for Valles Caldera National Preserve via a winding road headed west at 1:15 p.m. We curved around a mountain to 9,000 feet and pulled into an overlook to gaze upon the remnants of an ancient volcano at around 2 p.m.
I am grateful to modern geologists for their insight into the earth’s past and recommend John McPhee’s Basin and Range to those with a similar delight.
Our drive total totaled a paltry 125 miles, although we traveled far in time.
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