From Santa Fe, Bandelier National Monument is about an hour drive and worth a stop!
In New Mexico, more than one million years ago, huge volcanic explosions rained ash and cinders over a 1500 square mile area. Ash flows up to 1,000 feet thick covered the landscape. As the hot ash cooled it welded into a rock called “tuff”. The volcano collapsed into itself, leaving a circular depression called a “caldera” (known today as Valles Caldera). Bandelier is located on this tuff that sits on the outer slope layer of the caldera.
Since tuff is very light and soft, the wind and water gradually eroded away softer areas of tuff, creating holes in the exposed canyon faces. The Ancestral Pueblo people used these to their advantage. With hand tools, they enlarged and shaped cliff openings into useful shelters called cavates (CAVE-eights). They used tuff blocks to build apartment-like homes along the cliff faces.
A visit to this park would not be complete without checking out its informative Visitor Center and hiking the Main Loop Trail, another amazing Civilian Conservation Corps creation. Some of this 1.4-mile loop trail is paved and some is a wide pebbled path. Along the way you’ll visit archeological sites, pit houses, kivas, and cliffside dwellings which date back to between 1150 and 1600 AD.
From several of the dwellings, the walls of the largest structures can be seen.
We only had a few hours to visit Bandelier National Monument, but really enjoyed it!
