Bandelier National Monument – August 10

While in Santa Fe, we made a day trip to Bandelier National Monument, about 50 miles northwest of the city. The monument contains pueblos and cliff dwellings built seven to eight centuries ago.

Most of the dwellings are cave rooms carved out of the soft tuff rock. However, there was a large circular plaza built from adobe brick (Tyuonyi plaza). When it was new, the walls were plastered with a coat of smooth mud.

The life expectancy of the ancestral Pueblo people that built the dwellings was about 35 years.

There was a lot of damage to the parking lots and roads due to flooding in 2011 and 2013, so we had to take a shuttle into the park from White Rock.