5/10/25: New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument

Tsankawi, a separate section of nearby Bandelier National Monument that was the focus of the second morning of our New Mexico road trip, is the ancestral homeland of the people of San Ildefonso Pueblo. To the Tewa people, the name means "place of the round cactus." A sign indicated that the monument was an outdoor museum, something I'd never considered.

Climbing ladders was part of the trail, but since Steven's back surgery in February, we haven't been hiking and have only done very limited walking together. He decided to wait on terra firma while I saw what was up there! I wasn't wild at the prospect either, but curiosity got the better of me.

The views at, and from the top, beat out the heebie jeebies I felt! 

Perhaps another day we can complete the hike together, as I'd love to see what was around that bend!

Back in the car and a few miles further on was an overlook at Bandelier National Monument's Frijoles Canyon, carved over thousands of years by the waters of Frijoles Creek. The creek's headwaters were about 17 miles away at the edge of the Valles Caldera, a collapsed cone of one of just three North American super volcanoes. Over a million years ago, two massive eruptions, each more than 600 times more potent than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, deposited ash hundreds of feet thick, which compressed into a soft rock called tuff.

Ice Age hunters 10,000 years ago, to the first Native American pueblo dwellers who arrived nearly 800 years ago, made their homes here. Ancestral Pueblo people settled here because they were attracted to the canyon's year-round water supply and sheltered location. The soft, workable tuff was shaped into building blocks for masonry homes and carved cave rooms into the cliffs.

The mountains on the horizon were the San Gabriel range.

Before February 1932, when Bandelier came under the management of the National Park Service, the only 20th-century development in the canyon was a small guest ranch that offered limited accommodations to the few visitors intrepid enough to embark on a steep trail from the canyon's rim. Sixteen years had passed since Bandelier had become a National Monument, but there was still no road into the canyon. That changed rapidly with President Roosevelt's creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC in 1933. Over the next nine years, the CCC built the road bringing visitors to the canyon, trails, 31 buildings, including the visitor center, a water and waste disposal station, and bathrooms. It became the largest collection of CCC-built structures in any national park!

In the early 17th century, the Spanish introduced the traditional horno, which is still used for baking by the local Pueblo people. The remaining ashes and coals are removed once a fire heats the adobe and stone structure. The heat captured and radiated from the dome is enough to bake bread, cookies, and other sweets.

The cliffs throughout the canyon were tuff, the pinkish-tan rock formed from volcanic ash into layers of soft rock. Over time, wind and water slowly eroded away softer areas of tuff, creating holes in the exposed canyon faces. The canyon's inhabitants used hand tools to enlarge and shape cliff openings into useful shelters called cavates. They used tuff blocks to build apartment-like homes along the cliff faces in front of the cavates.

To keep the hiking as easy as possible, we chose the one-mile-long Main Loop Trail. This would allow us to visit cultural sites, view petroglyphs carved into canyon walls, and climb ladders into the canyon's cavates without doing anything too strenuous.

The large underground room, called a Big Kiva, was used for religious and political life for the Ancestral Pueblo people who occupied Frijoles Canyon from about 1150 to 1550. Kivas are still crucial for Pueblo life today. Because the kiva would have been covered with an earthen roof slightly above ground level by six wooden pillars, people entered and exited using a ladder in the ceiling.

The most significant difference between the Ancestral Pueblo people and the canyon's earliest inhabitants was their reliance on agriculture. Small fields were planted with corn, beans, and squash, known as the three sisters because they complement and support each other in growth and nutrition. 

The ancestral Puebloans' homes were not only in the canyon. These walls in the shadow of the cliffs belonged to the village of Tyuonyi, one of several large pueblos located within Bandelier National Monument that was occupied about 500-700 years ago. Specific building construction techniques suggest that knowledge was brought from the people of Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado. Approximately 100 people lived in the 400 rooms, with another 400 in the cliff dwellings above us. 

Daily life was spent outside, farming, grinding corn, making pottery, weaving, and more. Tyuonyi is one of many pueblos around Bandelier. But most sites have remained unexcavated at the request of the Pueblo people, some of whom can trace their ancestry to where we stood.

An overview of Tyuonyi as we climbed the trail to the cliff dwellings:

The road warrior needed a break!

As we reached the cliffs, we could see how erosion had affected the very soft volcanic tuff.

Over a thousand carved rooms or cavates are located in the walls of Frijoles Canyon. Masonry structures were built in front of most cavates. Groups of these homes or cavate villages were used by generation after generation of Ancestral Pueblo people.

Gouges in the ceilings of cavates show that builders used digging sticks and sharpened stones to enlarge naturally occurring openings in the tuff. Most cavates were single rooms, but some were connected by interior doorways. Many cavates were fronted with masonry structures up to three stories high, constructed of tuff blocks and mud mortar. 

Cavates were predominantly located in south or southeast-facing cliffs because sunlight warmed the dwellings during cold winters, while the thick stone kept them cool in summer. 

Talus House was reconstructed in 1920 to show what cliff dwellings with a front building may have looked like. New archaeological information suggests the reconstruction was not entirely accurate. Entry was likely through a doorway in the roof, not in the front.

An excellent view of Frijoles Canyon:

On the cliff face was a small alcove with a soot-blacked ceiling and the remnants of zigzag rock drawings that may represent the feathered serpent known as Awanyu. His association with water made it an important figure in the arid land. The size and decorations suggest the structure was likely a kiva.

Lucky us – another ladder! As there was no other choice to see the interior of the cavate, we climbed it in stride more or less. The cavate was a sacred space for the Pueblo people of the past and today because of being the center of religious and social life.

A little further on the trail was another cavate. Unfortunately, access was denied to Cave Kiva because it had been vandalized by visitors who didn't know better. Monument staff is working with its tribal partners to reopen the site and assess the damage done. 

Further on at Long House, dwellings were built against the rock face, several stories high, as seen by the rows of holes in the rock. Extended families lived together within these homes, each with their own storage rooms, living quarters, and kiva.

Above the top row of holes were many petroglyphs, some easily identifiable as animals, arrows, etc. Once considered rock "art," it is now recognized that the drawings had much more profound significance for the Pueblo people. 

This painted pictograph was discovered hidden behind a layer of plaster on the back wall of a second-story dwelling. It was likely created for a specific purpose and then covered over. 

We retraced our steps to the visitor center via the opposite side of the cliff, on a verdant path that felt a million miles away from the arid landscape and rocky cliffs. It seemed almost impossible to imagine that tiny Frijoles Creek or El Rita de los Frijoles, Spanish for "the little river of beans," became a raging torrent in 2011 and 2013 when severe flash floods followed a fire and intensely burned the stream's upper watershed.

Archaeologists have long questioned what led the cliff dwellers to leave the area. Was it a lack of resources, overpopulation, or environmental change? Could a major flood event 450 years ago in Frijoles Canyon have affected their departure? Although people haven't lived in the canyon since then, modern Pueblo people believe the site is not abandoned, as their ancestors still inhabit Bandelier in spirit.

Next post: Visiting Los Alamos and Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

Posted on May 14th, 2025, from dusty Las Cruces in southern New Mexico, where we've rented a condo for a week. We received National Weather Alerts on our phones yesterday and today because of hazardous weather conditions caused by blowing sand advisories. Being told to "Pull Aside, Stay Alive" was enough to make anyone's heart beat a tad faster. Please take care of yourselves and your loved ones wherever you and they are.