Bandelier National Monument
NEW MEXICO
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Located at the base of the Jemez Mountains
15 Entrance Road
Los Alamos, NM 87544
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There is a small circular car park outside the Visitor’s Center and some adjacent at the end of the trail but it gets very congested.
There is a shuttle starting at 10am running from Frey Trail every 30 minutes. This shuttle is now mandatory from mid-May to mid-October.
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$15 per person or $25 per vehicle
Free if you have the America the Beautiful Pass
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Limited parking
Very well known = very busy
No pets
At the base of the Jemez Mountains just outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico is Bandelier National Monument. This was my second trip to see cave dwellings (the first being the Gila Cliff Dwellings). I was boondocking at a spot high in the Jemez Mountains, making the venture in and out fairly long, but I was stoked to find that Bandelier was just another ten minutes drive from the park exit into Los Alamos, so I had to make a stop.
The Basics
Bandelier is roughly 33,000 acres of designated wilderness at the base of the Santa Fe National Forest. The main attraction is the Ancestral Pueblo dwellings found in Frijoles Canyon. These dwellings were occupied between 1150-1550 AD, most likely being abandoned when the tribes moved east closer to the Rio Grande. The dwellings called cavates (cave + excavate) were dug out of the soft materials left by the Valles Caldera explosion 1.4 million years ago. The limestone and sandstone was covered in volcanic ash, creating a malleable shelf to work with.
Getting There
In comparison to the long and tedious drive out to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, these are much easier to access. Just 20 minutes south of Los Alamos and less than an hour from Santa Fe, the entrance to Bandelier is right off a main road. That being said, that makes this spot all the more popular and thus all the more packed. Between mid May and mid October, the park will be providing a shuttle from Frey Trail to the Visitor’s Center because the parking lot just cannot accommodate the amount of visitors.
Pueblo Loop Trail
This trail is remarkably easy. The main walk is paved and wheelchair accessible in some parts. The loop is 1.4 miles long and takes you through the Tyuonyi village and up past the Long House.
The Tyuonyi village is in the canyon floor. The path snakes through the remnants of the structures which make up a total of 245 rooms. Although less is known about this site, the structures may have been as high as three stories. It is also believed that the Puebloans divided their time between the village and the cliff houses depending on the time of year, spending summers in Tyuonyi.
There’s not much to see except for the remnants of walls and what used to be a kiva. Keep on the path a few hundred yards and you will come to the beginning of the cliff dwellings. The path does have railings for the most part but the steps can be steep and in some places the path very narrow so watch your footing. around the bend you’ll come across a reproduction of a Talus house, although it is now thought that the structures most likely did not look like this. Either way, it gives you some perspective on what the space could have been instead of just some holes in the cliff face, which I thought it was pretty cool.
Winding around, you’ll come to a large area with lots of cavates, some with ladders leading inside. The dwellings are very fragile and could easily be damaged so it’s important to take care and only examine those that are made accessible via the ladders.
Please don’t just walk up and crawl all over the place.
I saw a family with their child sitting inside one just beyond the sign indicating that this was prohibited. I was disappointed to see children crawling all over like it was a playground and their parents gleefully snapping pics.
Farther down, one of the rooms was blocked off with a sign reading that it had been vandalized. This is the kind of shit that leads to park closures and increased fees. Don’t be these people.
Keep following the path around and you’ll come to the Long House. This is a section of the dwellings built into the cliff faces that would have been two to three stories high, much like a condo complex. The circular holes, called vigas, were meant to hold beams to support the structures.
In some of the photos, you can make out paintings and petroglyphs etched into the walls between cavates.
The Alcove House
After you’ve done the main loop, you can either finish the loop back to the Visitor’s Center or take the trail right to the Alcove House, a half mile in each direction. Although I was first deterred by the height warnings, I was determined to see this monument to its fullest and without a bunch of kids crawling all over. The path to Alcove House is unpaved but very easy and mostly shaded and surprisingly less busy.
Below is the first peak of Alcove House form the path and if you look closely, you can see the series of ladders leading up to it.
In order to access Alcove House, you will have to climb over 140 feet up four different ladders and many carved steps. I’m not going to lie, it scared the living shit out of me. Although the ladders are in great condition, some of the steps are questionable at best and if you aren’t paying attention and holding the railing, you could easily plummet to your death. Whoopsie.
There can be a little bit of a traffic jam halfway up the steps as only 15 people are permitted to be in the Alcove House at one time. I had to wait for a family to come down but once I’d ascended, I had the entire place to myself for quite sometime until a couple showed up. Much, much less foot traffic than the main dwellings.
Inside the alcove, you’ll see the same cavates and beam holes as you did at Long house. There is a recreated kiva on the far end of the space but it has been permanently closed due to issues with stability.
Alcove House was by far the best part of my trip to Bandelier. Unfortunately, there were just too many stupid people for me to fully enjoy it. I would definitely go back and see it again, maybe closer to the end of winter as the spring brings ‘em out in droves but as far as cliff dwellings go, the Gila Cliff Dwellings were a much nicer experience and well worth the trip.
xoxo, The Bitter Bitch
Abandoned cave dwellings in the Jemez Mountains