Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier is a small gem located in the mountains northwest of Santa Fe in northern New Mexico. It is close to Los Alamos National Labs and the Valle Caldera. The park preserves both archaeological features of the Ancestral Pueblo people (much like Mesa Verde), and a mountainous landscape of forest and high desert savannah.

Cave dwellings at Bandelier. A few are open to visitors via ladders. Ar right: view from a cave dwelling with the ruins of a settlement in Frijoles Valley visible below the forest.

Starting at the visitors center, I took the main trail to see the ruins of the village and the cave dwellings that the former inhabitants carved into the soft sandstone rocks that line the northeast side of Frijoles Valley. Unlike Mesa Verde, visitors to the park are allowed to enter some of the dwellings without special tickets. I climbed into a few of the tight chambers with their natural rock windows and blackened ceilings from ancient fires. The people who used to inhabit Bandelier also used stone bricks and mortar to build living structures and kivas (ceremonial chambers) adjacent to the cliffs or on the valley floor.

View of Frijoles Valley from a sandstone alcove where the ruins of a ceremonial Kiva were located. Inset at right is a NPS diagram of the layout of the kiva.

Box elder with developing fruits.

I continued hiking up Frijoles Canyon beyond the archaeological attractions into the Bandelier Wilderness. Frijoles Creek, a very narrow creek, ran with cool water. The valley from the visitors center up into the wilderness was well forested, mainly by ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa; needles in bunches of three) and box elder, a broadleaf tree that produces winged samara fruits like maples. There were other tree species too including gambel oak (their lobed leaves  are shaped like the valley oaks that I am used to in California), Douglas fir, narrow-leaf cottonwood, and maybe species of Salix and Tamarix. 

The valley had a number of blooming species of plants too including a lovely shrub (western chokecherry, Prunus virginiana). Each plant had numerous inflorescences several inches long with dozens of fragrant white flowers. Another very attractive species growing in forest areas was a member of the pea family (golden pea, Thermopsis rhombifolia), having spikes of yellow-flowers (suggesting a species of lupine), but leaves with three main leaflets (unlike other lupines that I am familiar with where there are typically many leaflets). In the more open grasslands, an attractive aster, with golden and red ray flowers could be found.

Reference

Blackwell LR. 2006. Great Basin Wildflowers. The Globe Perquot Press, Guilford, CN

The very fragrant and beautiful flowers of Prunus virginiana.

Frijoles Creek.

Left: Ruins of a village built at the base of the cliff wall. The parallel series of holes in the sandstone cliff are where wooden beams used to extend over the buildings. Right: Natural sandstone sculpture and valley ruins.