Day 3 – Sugarite to Bandelier

I’ll try to be brief.

We woke, broke camp, and headed out. Instead of taking Interstate 25 south, then US 85 / 285 north (AKA the fast, boring way), we took US 64 west, followed by a series of New Mexico state highway whose numbers I can’t remember (AKA the slower, much more interesting and beautiful way).

You can find our route by pulling up Google Maps, routing from Raton to Santa Fe, and choosing every possible slower, crinklier route option.

US 64 approximates the path of the Santa Fe trail, one of the transcontinental trails used for migration and/or trade (the Santa Fe trail was more of a trade route) from the early 19th century until the coming of the railroad after the American Civil War.

Starting from Raton, you strike out west-southwest, keeping a mostly straight bearing, with the mesas of the lava fields on your right and the open plains on your left. Then you get to the town of Cimarron, and the expanses of juniper and cholla scrub give way to pine forested mountains.

We climbed through the Carson National Forest, going through the towns of Eagle’s Nest and Angelfire, and passing 9kft elevation, on our way to Taos. At Taos, we turned south and re-entered the forest and took a crazy series of turns from one state highway to another, to another, to another, before finally descending into the Rio Grande rift valley and ending up on NM 502 a few miles from Los Alamos and Bandelier Nat’l Monument.

We pitched camp quickly and decided to go check out Los Alamos.

It was weird.

Imagine a university campus that was constructed in the 1940s, and has been expanded and expanded until the present day. Also the university only teaches high-energy particle physics. Now have a town start growing up in and amongst the university buildings. Now imagine that the college was originally built by the US Department of Defense, and is now run by the US Department of Energy. But not the part that, say, works on improving solar panels. The part that works with the Department of Defense, and never tells anyone what it’s doing. Finally, imagine that 80% of the university’s campus is behind razor wire fences, and that for some reason there are three gigantic and very well equipped fire and rescue facilities in this tiny university town.

That’s Los Alamos. So we left.

When we left camp, we only had neighbors across from us. When we returned, we had them in every direction, and three of the groups knew each other. They were very loud, and not good neighbors, so let us draw the curtain over night three – except to note that, once again, the sky was entirely cloudy and rain threatened over and over without ever setting in.

Day 4 - Santa Fe

We woke, had breakfast, grabbed our packs, and headed to the Bandelier visitor center to do the main loop hike. In a distance of about two miles, all flat until the very end (which involves stairs and ladders, not hills), you can see dozens of Puebloan dwellings.

In two places you can climb up into cliffside dwellings and gaze out at the canyon below. They are compact spaces, carved out of a volcanic rock called tuff, which is the ash equivalent of sandstone. It is a very humbling experience.

At the end of the trail there is a 140 foot climb up a series of stairs and ladders, which cakes you to a deeply recessed alcove within the canyon wall. A kiva was constructed here. It is an amazing place to be.

The first thing I noticed, the first time I came to a desert, was that life follows water, very literally. And in many places in the deserts of the American Southwest, where there is water, there are canyons. Canyons always provide shelter and water, but this canyon was a particularly rich place to live. There are ponderosa pine, and gambel oak. There are squirrels and turkeys. There’s volcanic soil for farming. It’s so very easy to see why people lived here for hundreds of years.

Entry ends here, as I was distracted by stargazing and lightning.