Bandlelier National Park - New Mexico

The next morning we headed out on a long loop drive through the scenic areas to the west of Santa Fe. The highlight of the drive was our visit to Bandalier National park. Bandalier turned out to be a small, attractive park tucked in the bottom of an out of the way canyon. Thanks to a reliable stream running through this canyon, it had been the home for a number of early Native American Indians who built their pueblos along the canyon walls. As with Mesa Verde, these early pueblo Indians built small dwellings in some of the holes and caves in the canyon walls during the later stages of their occupation of this canyon. The small, intimate scale of these Indian ruins, coupled with the limited number of tourists visiting the site, made this a very pleasant experience, notably different from the Mesa Verde experience where there had been large numbers of tourists at all of the cliff dwellings we visited. Bandalier is definitely a park we would like to come back and visit again someday.

Continuing on our loop drive, we passed a number of facilities carrying on who knows what kind of activities for Las Alamos National laboratory, which is located in the nearby town of Las Alamos. We hope they still aren’t trying to make more nuclear weapons in these small facilities as their isolated location would make them easy targets of terrorists!!!

A very pleasant surprise about half way through our loop drive was coming upon a caldera, which was the remains of an ancient volcano. Apparently, this volcano exploded many centuries ago with a tremendous force much greater than the Mount Saint Helena explosion up in the northwest a few decades ago. This explosion literally blew away the entire top off the volcano, leaving this broad, circular/oval caldera. At first blush, it looked like a vast meadow, and it was startling to realize just how big that volcano must have been in diameter and how powerful the explosion must have been which blew its walls to smithereens.

In addition to these highlights, this scenic loop drive offered a number of other attractive areas, including a scenic overlook of the Rio Grande River, some quaint little towns, and a therapeutic hot spring. We were tired by the end of the long day’s drive but enjoyed ourselves considerably.