Bandalier is a national park with the main attraction being the excavated ruins of a pueblo village and its accompanying cliff dwellings. Carved out of layers of volcanic ash by millions of years of erosion (a.k.a. water-action,) the cliffs are incredibly porous and crumbly, making it easier to dig out and enlarge the caves that served as storage rooms to the cliff-backed house structures.
Ready to hike the trail! We only actually went into Frijoles Canyon - a tiny part of the park with the main visitors center.
It's hard to get an idea of scale, but in the center of this image (click to enlarge) there's a reconstructed cliff structure against the cliff face. In the foreground are the original walls of the large circular town in the valley. They were reinforced with modern mortar, but the stones were kept in their found locations.
The walking trail takes you up to that structure, which stands about ten feet tall. You can see Elizabeth leaning into a window on the left.
From there, you get a pretty good view of the circular layout in the valley below.
In some places you got to climb up these ladders and crawl around in the shallow caves that had been carved out of the cliff face.
There will be a lot more climbing before the day is done.
Some of these caves had quite estensive structures. In this one there were four attached rooms, none tall enough to stand in, but probably had about 2-300 square feet of floor space.
Looking out of that cave you can see the same circular ruins just past the natural rock formations.
Further along the path you come to a place called the longhouse. There are still ruins of the buildings that once stood here, making up what was basically one 800-yard-long apartment complex up to 4 stories high in places.
The horizontal rows of holes in the cliff face held the back of the roof joists, just to give an idea of how high they built.
After taking the path back to the valley floor, we followed the valley further inward and climbed 140 feet up to the sacred cave.
The ladders were the most fun, and the view from the top was pretty cool. No guard rails or any real safety precautions to ruin the effect from up there.
One last ladder to go. Elizabeth beat me to the top.
But she eventually decided to wait for me.
We could actually climb down into the ceremonial Kiva - essentially a hole in the ground covered over with a sturdy, earth-topped roof. Apparently there were other adobe structures up here as well.
After downing all our water and trudging back to the car (quite possibly the driest place I've ever been) we headed back to Adobe Abode to relax a while before going out shopping. Santa Fe has lots of cool handcrafted jewelry if you're into that sort of thing, and a bunch of neat little restaurants in the admittedly touristy areas we walked.
For dinner that evening we headed out of Santa Fe proper to have dinner at this tiny roadside burger joint called the Shed. Pretty good food, but the burgers couldn't hold a candle to Bubbas Burger Shack back in Houston.
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