Jemez Mountain Trail, NM

Santa Fe is a much smaller city than Phoenix even if it is the capital. As we started out on the day’s adventure this morning, Steve commented, “I could live here.” It's an interesting convergence of Mexican, Native American and cowboy/Anglo cultures with opera, symphony and museums. It seems like almost every road in the area is marked “scenic” and rightfully so. We chose to spend our day on the Jemez Mountain Trail, and it was an excellent choice.

First stop: Bandelier National Monument, and we could have spent the whole day there. It protects thousands of 12^th to 16^th c archaeological sites from the ancestral Pueblo culture. A 1.5 mile paved trail goes from behind the Frijoles Canyon Visitor Center. The trail passes through a circle of ancient stone houses that reminded me of a modern condominium complex.

I took this later from the cliffs so you could see the circle.

The cliffs are soft tuff from an ancient volcano, naturally eroded. The people enlarged holes into rooms and built houses against the cliffs to take advantage of them. Despite the cold of winter and heat of summer, the cliff houses maintained a regular comfortable temperature.

Here you can see the holes cut for roof poles all along the cliff.

Traditional ladders give access to a few of the houses.

When I climbed up to see inside, I kept thinking how much my grandkids would love this...and how nervous I would be with them exploring around the holes.

One of the side rooms in this same house.

After vowing to return with more time to explore the trails and investigate another ruin further up the canyon (which involves multiple ladders to get to it), we picnicked at the trailhead for Jemez Falls.

A lovely quarter-mile trail leads through the pines to the falls, and I concluded that this high wooded area would be a great place to camp with easy access back to the ruins we had been exploring in the morning as well as lots of trails.

We continued on NM4 as far as Jemez Springs. This outcropping is called Battleship Rock for obvious reasons.

We left much to explore on another trip, including a mineral swimming hole where bathing suits are optional.

We returned via Los Alamos which still has an elaborate collection of research centers. We had to pass through security to get into the town. Again we concluded that it needed way more time than we had to give to explore the museum.

Tomorrow we start home in earnest although we have one more scenic highway to explore as we go.