A Week in Bandelier
by Chris Dunn
(Written 2014)
It was a sunny, warm evening in late October 2014 when the last shuttle of the year dropped me off at the Bandelier National Monument Visitor Center minutes before closing. I had come south from Alaska, running from the impending winter, in order to get a taste of New Mexico’s backcountry. After a quick, painless permitting process involving some explanation of regulations I was out the door.
I began my hike up canyon, speeding past the main attractions of the Tyuonyi Pueblo and Alcove House, structures built long ago by the Ancestral Puebloan peoples. Aside from a few downed trees, the walking was fairly easy through a canyon with a small perennial stream. The Las Conchas Fire of 2011 burnt much of the park, leaving blackened snags both standing and down. Overall this didn’t create too much difficulty, slowing progress only a bit, and causing me to consider where I placed my tent so as not to get crushed if one of the standing snags were to fall during a midnight wind gust. Nevertheless, the early darkness of late fall caught me before I arrived in camp.
My real adventure began the following day after I climbed up the mesa overlooking Frijoles Canyon, hiked several miles across, and eventually dropped down to camp not far from the Rio Grande. The riverbanks were lush with vegetation and the riparian was alive with birds. Fluttering songbirds and squawking ducks were plentiful – especially loud at sunrise along with the smacking of a beaver’s tail. Flocks of sandhill cranes flew overhead in V’s, squawking loudly, having followed me south from Alaska. Bear tracks coated the brown muddy riverbank; an odd combination to me – I had no idea bears could be found in the desert.
I pressed on into Capulin Canyon, walking over sand interspersed with boulders in a canyon composed of volcanic tuff: ancient solidified volcanic ash with black magma formations in its lower stretches. After a couple of nights of solitude, it was a surprise to stumble into a large group of visitors from the local Cochiti Pueblo visiting the Painted Cave: a high indentation in the rock filled with red and white designs of people, hands, snakes, strange shamanic figures, and what looked like a monkey and a dinosaur.
The Puebloans told me that they lived “four canyons over” and were out for a day trip to see what their ancestors had made, not so much different I suppose than a Frenchman visiting Lascaux Cave. As I continued up the canyon, the sand began to dampen, eventually emerging into a stream and Ponderosa Pine forest. I pressed on for miles, camping out of the Monument in the Santa Fe National Forest’s Dome Wilderness.
I climbed out of Capulin Canyon onto another mesa, leaving all trails behind, walking across grassland dotted with the occasional tree and cactus, admiring the view of the nearby calderas. Eventually I reentered the Monument and caught a trail that led me through a gorgeous canyon filled with tall red-barked ponderosas, unscathed by the fire, looming over a dense mat of pine needles and huge white rounded boulders. I had dreamt of mountain lion the night before and I now sensed that this canyon was his home.
What had been a shallow drainage in the mountains quickly plunged hundreds of feet down steep, cliffy rock, reemerging in the desert as a low sandy wash. The trail led down onto an expansive plateau. Not far from the canyon’s entrance stood a great circle of stacked pumice rocks around two ancient, worn statues of mountain lions lying prone. Surely this canyon was and is the lion’s home. I tried to imagine the people of long ago coming to this circle from the nearby Yapashi Pueblo holding ceremony, at least in part to honor the sacred power and magnificence of this elusive creature. I continued across the plateau, stopping by the pueblo’s pumice ruins, camping on the mesa above Alamo Canyon. My tent was on white sand, surrounded by cactus and juniper. I was rewarded with more sandhill cranes, a sky filled with a burnt-orange sunset, moon, and stars.
Coyote’s howl woke me at dawn the next morning. I dropped down into Alamo Canyon and continued on, still alone. I had not and would not see anyone other than local Puebloans while in the backcountry during my entire hike. The desert wilderness has a way, with its silence, of truly giving one a deep sense of solitude. It is a wonderfully terrifying experience – simultaneously producing great homesickness and great peace. Though I appreciated the solitude, I wondered where people were. The weather was fantastic, the place was beautiful. Was it just the timing – midweek, school in session, or were people forgetting to take advantage of the wilderness at their doorsteps?
The canyon’s walls were again volcanic ash but fantastically carved, sometimes in great white cones. Birds sung and flitted about, hawks shrieked and circled overhead, ravens croaked, wild turkeys fled, a mother black bear and cub smashed through the vegetation just above me while I hiked in the canyon bottom. I continued for miles and miles; the stream came and went, emerging and disappearing into the sandy canyon floor; the canyon narrowed; the living forest transitioned into an endless burnt ghost forest, leaving its toppled corpses piled on the stream floor. The canyon narrowed yet more. Claustrophobia set in. I found an exit, scrambling up rock and sand, camping high up amongst the pines.
During the night a cold front moved in, bringing a great storm of cold rain and sleet, with snow up higher – the first of the year. My timing was perfect as this spelled the end of my trip. As is always the case after time spent alone in the wilderness, the transition back to pavement and traffic and people, though much longed for during the sojourn, was painful.
Bandelier, while not an especially remote area given its proximity to Los Alamos and nearby highways, has much to offer. It is remarkable in both its natural beauty and its enduring human history. I love the Alaskan wilderness with its much stronger sense of being untouched and unpeopled, due to its relative lack of human impacts, though it too has its human history where the occasional rotting cabin or rock inuksuk can be found; but I also appreciate the Bandelier Wilderness, which very prominently presents itself as once a home for people, and as I witnessed, is still actively utilized by the ancestors of those people and anyone else who chooses to come, as I did, and experience and revere the place.
by Chris Dunn
(Written 2014)
It was a sunny, warm evening in late October 2014 when the last shuttle of the year dropped me off at the Bandelier National Monument Visitor Center minutes before closing. I had come south from Alaska, running from the impending winter, in order to get a taste of New Mexico’s backcountry. After a quick, painless permitting process involving some explanation of regulations I was out the door.
I began my hike up canyon, speeding past the main attractions of the Tyuonyi Pueblo and Alcove House, structures built long ago by the Ancestral Puebloan peoples. Aside from a few downed trees, the walking was fairly easy through a canyon with a small perennial stream. The Las Conchas Fire of 2011 burnt much of the park, leaving blackened snags both standing and down. Overall this didn’t create too much difficulty, slowing progress only a bit, and causing me to consider where I placed my tent so as not to get crushed if one of the standing snags were to fall during a midnight wind gust. Nevertheless, the early darkness of late fall caught me before I arrived in camp.
My real adventure began the following day after I climbed up the mesa overlooking Frijoles Canyon, hiked several miles across, and eventually dropped down to camp not far from the Rio Grande. The riverbanks were lush with vegetation and the riparian was alive with birds. Fluttering songbirds and squawking ducks were plentiful – especially loud at sunrise along with the smacking of a beaver’s tail. Flocks of sandhill cranes flew overhead in V’s, squawking loudly, having followed me south from Alaska. Bear tracks coated the brown muddy riverbank; an odd combination to me – I had no idea bears could be found in the desert.
I pressed on into Capulin Canyon, walking over sand interspersed with boulders in a canyon composed of volcanic tuff: ancient solidified volcanic ash with black magma formations in its lower stretches. After a couple of nights of solitude, it was a surprise to stumble into a large group of visitors from the local Cochiti Pueblo visiting the Painted Cave: a high indentation in the rock filled with red and white designs of people, hands, snakes, strange shamanic figures, and what looked like a monkey and a dinosaur.
The Puebloans told me that they lived “four canyons over” and were out for a day trip to see what their ancestors had made, not so much different I suppose than a Frenchman visiting Lascaux Cave. As I continued up the canyon, the sand began to dampen, eventually emerging into a stream and Ponderosa Pine forest. I pressed on for miles, camping out of the Monument in the Santa Fe National Forest’s Dome Wilderness.
I climbed out of Capulin Canyon onto another mesa, leaving all trails behind, walking across grassland dotted with the occasional tree and cactus, admiring the view of the nearby calderas. Eventually I reentered the Monument and caught a trail that led me through a gorgeous canyon filled with tall red-barked ponderosas, unscathed by the fire, looming over a dense mat of pine needles and huge white rounded boulders. I had dreamt of mountain lion the night before and I now sensed that this canyon was his home.
What had been a shallow drainage in the mountains quickly plunged hundreds of feet down steep, cliffy rock, reemerging in the desert as a low sandy wash. The trail led down onto an expansive plateau. Not far from the canyon’s entrance stood a great circle of stacked pumice rocks around two ancient, worn statues of mountain lions lying prone. Surely this canyon was and is the lion’s home. I tried to imagine the people of long ago coming to this circle from the nearby Yapashi Pueblo holding ceremony, at least in part to honor the sacred power and magnificence of this elusive creature. I continued across the plateau, stopping by the pueblo’s pumice ruins, camping on the mesa above Alamo Canyon. My tent was on white sand, surrounded by cactus and juniper. I was rewarded with more sandhill cranes, a sky filled with a burnt-orange sunset, moon, and stars.
Coyote’s howl woke me at dawn the next morning. I dropped down into Alamo Canyon and continued on, still alone. I had not and would not see anyone other than local Puebloans while in the backcountry during my entire hike. The desert wilderness has a way, with its silence, of truly giving one a deep sense of solitude. It is a wonderfully terrifying experience – simultaneously producing great homesickness and great peace. Though I appreciated the solitude, I wondered where people were. The weather was fantastic, the place was beautiful. Was it just the timing – midweek, school in session, or were people forgetting to take advantage of the wilderness at their doorsteps?
The canyon’s walls were again volcanic ash but fantastically carved, sometimes in great white cones. Birds sung and flitted about, hawks shrieked and circled overhead, ravens croaked, wild turkeys fled, a mother black bear and cub smashed through the vegetation just above me while I hiked in the canyon bottom. I continued for miles and miles; the stream came and went, emerging and disappearing into the sandy canyon floor; the canyon narrowed; the living forest transitioned into an endless burnt ghost forest, leaving its toppled corpses piled on the stream floor. The canyon narrowed yet more. Claustrophobia set in. I found an exit, scrambling up rock and sand, camping high up amongst the pines.
During the night a cold front moved in, bringing a great storm of cold rain and sleet, with snow up higher – the first of the year. My timing was perfect as this spelled the end of my trip. As is always the case after time spent alone in the wilderness, the transition back to pavement and traffic and people, though much longed for during the sojourn, was painful.
Bandelier, while not an especially remote area given its proximity to Los Alamos and nearby highways, has much to offer. It is remarkable in both its natural beauty and its enduring human history. I love the Alaskan wilderness with its much stronger sense of being untouched and unpeopled, due to its relative lack of human impacts, though it too has its human history where the occasional rotting cabin or rock inuksuk can be found; but I also appreciate the Bandelier Wilderness, which very prominently presents itself as once a home for people, and as I witnessed, is still actively utilized by the ancestors of those people and anyone else who chooses to come, as I did, and experience and revere the place.
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