We visited a lot of great places in New Mexico and had a wonderful trip, but Bandelier was probably my favorite.
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Life Imitates Earth
I was struck how the carved rooms at the bottom of the cliff resembled the natural holes that run all the way up the cliff face. These rooms were at the edge of the main area and were extremely small. Perhaps this is where misbehaving husbands were sent to spend the night, their equivalent of the modern practice of being condemned to sleep on the couch.
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A Theory, Which is Mine
No one is quite certain why the ancestral Pueblos eventually moved elsewhere, but my theory is that when they carved their media centers into the rock, they left room for their standard-definition televisions. When high-definition sets swept the Southwest, there was no room to expand to accomodate the wider TV's and they were forced to move away and begin their carvings anew.
It's just a theory. The little round holes that you see are where log poles would attach small buildings to the cliff dwellings. Most of those buildings no longer exist but the rooms carved into the cliffs remain. |
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All That Remains
It's the higher cliff dwellings and kivas that take your breath away, but there was a large group of former dwellings and kivas down below near the trees. All that remains are some sections of the walls, you can at least get a feel for the layout and size of the community. I was struck by how small the rooms were, but perhaps if you spent a lot of your waking hours outside the rooms were plenty big (and warm).
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Not Abandoned
Bandelier was easily one of our favorite places during our first trip to New Mexico. The informational materials there pointed out that the modern Pueblo peoples don't like the homes of the ancestral Pueblos to be referred to as ruins (and the implication that they are abandoned) as they feel a strong spiritual connection to their ancestors there.
The old cliff and cave dwellings aren't abandoned in more ways than that, as we saw a variety of wildlife even in the main part of the day. Some of the animals were new species to me, like Williamson's sapsucker, canyon wrens, rock squirrels, and a few lizards I wasn't able to identify. And then there were animals I had seen before but was still delighted to see, such as this fence lizard I found sunning itself beside the trail as I made my way back to the Visitor's Center. |
We still had enough time at the end of the day to wander up to the western edge of the park and do a little hiking on the Cerro Grande trail. At the trailhead parking lot, this sapsucker flew up into a tree right next to the wooden fence. The tree was obviously a favorite as it had drilled a bunch of irregular holes on one side of the tree and a regular patchwork of squares on the other side.
It was my first time to ever see this sapsucker, a beautiful little jewel, and I was thrilled to be only a few feet away and watch it work the tree for sap. While we were watching, we heard a loud crashing sound a short ways away in the forest. As we looked up, a tree came crashing down across the trail ahead of us, unusual given the lack of wind.
If we hadn't stopped to watch the sapsucker, we might have been on the trail when the tree came down, so this little bird became not only one of my favorite wildlife encounters from the trip, but also our most beautiful protector.