Bandolier National Monument - Pueblo Cave Dwellings

Carol and I drove north out of Santa Fe to Bandolier National Monument near Los Alamos, New Mexico. A National Monument is a piece of land that has great historic and/or environmental significance, but our do-nothing Congress can't get its act together to vote to make it a National Park. Bandolier is a ruin of an ancient Pueblo cave dwelling village in the Frijoles Canyon. Jemez Mountain - the largest land form in the park - is actually a long inactive volcano that spewed out some volcanic ash called "tuff" that settled sometimes miles deep all around it when it last blew and created very soft rock that naturally and due to man's influence develops caves easily. The photos below show the natural landscape: Jemez Mountain, Frijoles Canyon and some of the Swiss cheese rock formations.


The Pueblo discovered this land 10,000 years ago, and then in the 1200s they hollowed out the caves with stone tools and created cave dwellings for themselves. In about the 1400s and 1500s, they also built structures on the ground to create a canyon-floor based village.

We took the self-guided main trail tour of both dwelling types. The photo mashup below shows the ruins of the ground dwellings as they exist now. At their height these buildings would have been two and sometimes three stories high with wood and mud roofs.

The photo to the left is an artist's interpretation of how the ground dwellings would have looked in the 15th and 16th Century.

Pat wandered off and climbed up one of the ladders into a cave dwelling. It was not particularly easy to climb up that ladder, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The inside was very cozy and warm, with two pits hollowed out on the floor - no doubt one was for a fire. Coming down the ladder was considerably harder than going up. We passed on going up the other two ladders on the trail. The photo mashup below shows the ladder, me in the cave, me sitting at the mouth of the cave when Carol relocated me, and Carol sitting in the same cave.

We drove back an sunset, picked up a bottle of champagne, and returned to Gail's house for a dinner of left-overs with champagne. A good time was had by all.