Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier sits in a canyon on the flank of the Jemez volcano, about an hour northwest of Santa Fe, and the first thing you should know is that the rock here is strange. It is tuff — compacted volcanic ash, soft enough to carve with a harder stone, full of holes and pockets where gas bubbles froze in the cooling ash. For the Ancestral Puebloans who lived here, that softness was an invitation. They enlarged the natural cavities into rooms, built masonry houses against the cliff base, and farmed the canyon floor, leaving behind a settlement that you can still walk through and, in places, climb into.

I had been to a lot of southwestern ruins by the time I reached Bandelier, and I expected something I had to admire from behind a rope. Instead the main loop trail takes you right up to the cliff and lets you climb wooden ladders into the carved chambers, called cavates, that pock the rock face. Inside one of them I stood up straight in a small dark room and found the ceiling blackened with soot — the smoke of cooking fires from eight centuries ago, still there, because tuff holds it and the desert does not wash it away. That detail did more to collapse the distance of time than any museum has managed.

The main loop and the great kiva

The Frijoles Canyon trail is short and almost flat, which makes it deceptively easy to underestimate. It passes the ruins of Tyuonyi, a large circular pueblo on the canyon floor that once stood several stories high and housed perhaps a hundred people, now reduced to the foundations of its rooms arranged in a great ring. From there the trail runs along the base of the cliff past dwelling after dwelling, the ladders inviting you up, the canyon stream running cold and clear below.

Lia, who has a healthy fear of heights she likes to pretend she has conquered, made it up three ladders before declaring that she had seen enough cavates to last a lifetime and would wait in the shade. I went on to the Alcove House, which sits forty meters up the cliff face and is reached by a series of long ladders and stone steps. The climb is genuinely vertiginous, and at the top there is a reconstructed kiva and a view straight down the canyon. I am not sure I would call the going-up enjoyable, exactly, but the standing-there afterward certainly was.

Beyond the canyon

Most visitors do the main loop and leave, which is a mistake, because the monument extends far beyond Frijoles Canyon into a backcountry of mesa and canyon that almost nobody walks. There is a trail down to the Rio Grande, and another out to a group of ruins called Tsankawi, a detached section of the monument closer to the highway, where the trail follows paths worn so deeply into the soft rock by centuries of foot traffic that you walk in grooves up to your knees. I did Tsankawi late in the day with the light going gold and saw exactly two other people.

There is a complicated weight to a place like this. The descendants of the people who built these dwellings still live in the pueblos along the Rio Grande, and Bandelier is not a dead ruin to them but an ancestral home. The park signage handles this carefully, and so should you — these are not props. Standing in the canyon at the end of the day, I thought about how rarely you get to stand inside someone else’s eight-hundred-year-old kitchen and feel, however briefly, like a guest rather than a tourist.

When to go

Spring and autumn are ideal, with mild temperatures and fewer crowds. Summer is hot in the canyon and brings afternoon thunderstorms, and from late spring through early autumn a timed-entry shuttle from the nearby town of White Rock is often required for the main canyon during the day, so check the current access rules before you go. Winter is quiet and beautiful with occasional snow on the pink rock, though some trails and ladders may close. Carry water, and save the Tsankawi section for late afternoon light if you can.