One day while we were in Santa Fe we ventured out to Bandelier National Monument which is only about an hour or so away. It is an huge and important archeological site. It has about 33,000 acres. A clovis spear point was found at the site and was dated 12,000 years ago. The Ancestral Puebloan people moved in about 1150 AD and left about 1550. The Spanish came to the area and found it empty in 1600. Twenty three current tribes trace their ancestry back to Bandelier.

This is an overlook while still on the mesa looking out over the area.

This is Park Service photo on Flickr that I am borrowing. I didn’t take a photo of the entrance monument. What kind of blogger am I?

There are a lot of trails at Bandelier but we took the “easy” one. Hey we are flatlanders from Oklahoma what can I say.

A very nice creek, “Frijoles Creek” runs through the area. In fairly recent past it was a year round creek. Not any longer because of climate change. They do have bears apparently. At least they are grizzlies.

Tyuonyi – A Kiva built mainly for storing food. At its peak it was two stories tall and had 400 rooms.

We ascended a higher trail that took us close to the cliffs. So you can get a better view of Tyuonyi. There are lots of cave like structures called Cavetes carved out of the rock. The rock was a soft volcanic tuff that could be carved with sharp sticks or stones.

Many of the Cavetes had structures out in front of the cave. Some of them were several stories tall. You can tell where the different stories were by looking at the rows of holes drilled into the tuff. Those anchored the support beams of the roofs and floors. That also explains why some of the pictographs and petrographs are high up on the canyon wall.

As we were going on along the trail I noticed a lot of etchings on the cliff walls. I do think that they are petroglyphs carved into the rock. The more we looked, the more we saw. The volcanic rock is pretty soft so a lot of detail was missing.

We could see spirals and human type figures and a lot of other designs. They were everywhere and some appeared to be superimposed.

And we saw at least two petrographs which is where pigment is applied to the rock. It was pretty cool.

It took us about two hours to do the three mile “easy trail” we were worn out. There were other places to go that involved climbs up rickety looking ladders. So we passed. Our appetites are wetted though for more sights to see there. Maybe in the fall or spring when the weather wasn’t so hot.

More information:

Park Service Monument Web Site

Information about Adolph Bandolier who explored and studied the site and wrote a few books about it.

A blog post from National Park Traveler about visiting.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday