Bandelier National Monument

While James and I were in China, we said to ourselves, "Selves, there is so much to see in China, it's incredible. I imagine there's just that much to see in Utah and we just haven't taken the time to tour Utah even though we live there."

Then as we drove away from BYU last year to move to New Mexico we said to ourselves, "Selves, there's so much to see here in Utah that we never saw, and now we're leaving it. Never again!"

And now we've lived here a year and we're touring NM finally. Well, I suppose we did see the Balloon Fiesta and Old Town last year. This summer though we're hoping to see several National Parks here in NM.

We started with Bandelier National Monument. It was amazing! We sent our plans to our family and invited them along and Bradley took us up on the whole trip - camping on Friday - and Carl came for the hiking on Saturday.

We got to the campground and got the last site in the loop we wanted, hurried to set up camp and cook dinner so we could get to a Bat show that a park ranger was putting on at the little amphitheater. It was great! I learned lots about bats - I didn't know there was so much to know. And we heard bats with their sonar calls while we were there because apparently they were flying around above the campsites. Crazy, eh?




I was surprised how much junk camping requires. It took a few tries to get it all to fit perfectly for the trip home. Bradley was so easy to take camping! I was nervous about being responsible for him overnight but he was terrific!

This being our first trip, I went easy on the food. We had hotdogs Friday night with smores and starbursts, and then cereal and milk Saturday morning, PBJ for lunch and snacks throughout. It was nice to not have to stress about cooking anything really. We'll save that for future camping trips when I'm better at planning and packing. :D

We met Carl at the visitor's center and got Bradley a Junior Ranger book. This is a cool program that everybody should know about. Kids in 4-6 grades can get a little booklet to fill out and when they do, they get a patch from the Park Rangers. Apparently every park does this and it was a cool patch! Too bad I'm not a 4th grader again... Bradley now wants to go to every park to get all the patches. hehe.


So Bandelier is a place where cliff dwellers used to live. They are historically after the Mesa Verde group. These cliffs are made of volcanic leftovers so they're already soft and full of holes so the natives made great use of them. Lots of caves have ladders to climb but lots of the caves we weren't supposed to get to. It made me wish I was alive years ago when the community was thriving just to be able to climb all over the place.

There was this huge partially uncovered/restablized group of homes. I remember learning about stuff like this in Art History at BYU but we were studying groups in the Mediterranean area. Interesting how similar these two cultures are, eh?



This is a huge cave room we could stand in. They called it a Kiva and it has logs sticking out the roof. Apparently this was a room where a loom stood. And the black ceiling is from the smoke their fires created. (Actually they said they periodically resmoke this room because of graffiti.)
Here I am reading the info packet and walking. I haven't changed much since I was a kid. I remember walking home from the library reading as I went along. Maybe I'm a nerd.
This is where they built buildings into the cliffs. The buildings are mostly gone but the foundations are still there and the holes where the ceiling posts went into the cliffs. Cool, huh?
And we think dinosaurs were extinct for years. Apparently these people had seen T-rex's in the 1000's. My theory is that it's a turkey because apparently they were turkey farmers according to the museum.
Here's tradition: when James and I hiked the Timpanogos caves with family two years ago, there was a similar sign. We always get nervous when they put signs like this in front of trails and roller coasters but honestly, all it does is scream, "This is too much fun to handle!" So, therefore, we must do it.

This is us on the first ladder up to the Alcove house which is 140 feet in the air. You climb 90 ladder steps up and into the restored Kiva they have plus that many stairs as well. It's incredible! And tiring.


Some caves at the top... Carl pounded his hiking stick on the ground up there and it totally sounded hollow! I'm sure there are stacks of buried houses there just like they made at the bottom of the cliffs. How cool!
We were all on the lookout for wildlife. I printed out pictures of all the wildlife and wildflowers that the park website said we could expect to see this time of year and we had a scavenger hunt. I'm pretty sure we only saw about 4 things from our 40+ item list and probably 6 other things not even on our list.

After Bandelier, we drove up to Los Alamos to the National Laboratories Museum and watched some videos about WW2 and the nuclear bombs created there. It was pretty sobering but also amazing to know how much we humans are capable of. It makes me want to always keep learning and being productive. A good way to go, I suppose...

Also, since we've been to that bat show, I have seen at least two bats here in Rio Rancho flying around at night. I did learn something. :)