New Mexico

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Northern Rio Grande and Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Areas

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Quick logistical update: until summer, Mondays are Mexican World Heritage Sites, Thursdays are eclectic, and Saturdays are bonus park photos. I took the photos above yesterday in New Mexico and Colorado.

While technically in different regions, both National Heritage Areas are linked by the river, the mountains and our cultural heritage. The Rio Grande begins in the San Juan Mountains in south central Colorado and flows east through the San Luis Valley where it turns south into New Mexico. The scenic north section is called the Río Grande del Norte to distinguish it from the southern section that defines the Texas-Mexico border. The river flows through the Rio Grande Gorge and is now popular for whitewater rafting (see three rafts above left). In the distance are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (both photos).

Native Americans and Spanish explorers traveled up and down the river, settling on the fertile valleys. The native land was claimed by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Texans, and for a dozen years, the Río Grande del Norte defined the US-Mexico border in Colorado, before the US claimed the land all the way to California by treaty in 1848. In the Civil War, Texas secessionists battled Colorado volunteers at Glorietta Pass in New Mexico to decide the war in the southwest.

The Northern Río Grande National Heritage Area in New Mexico celebrates this magnificent natural scenery and the cultural heritage it guided. It also includes Taos Pueblo, wild & scenic rivers, historic trails, scenic byways, and several cliff dwellings. The area is both beautiful and fascinating, and I was not going to miss another chance to drive through on my way northeast.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains tower over the east side of the Río Grande del Norte from east of Santa Fe NM up into Colorado past the Great Sand Dunes. Meaning ‘blood of Christ’ in Spanish, the name likely refers to the scarlet colors of the mountains at sunset. The helpful illustration (my favorite photo above right) is on the Stations of the Cross trail up to a church that overlooks the historic San Luis Valley.

The Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area in New Mexico borders the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area in Colorado, and includes the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge famed for Sandhill Cranes in March, and Fort Garland, a fine restored Kit Carson fort with an interesting museum on Buffalo Soldiers—one turned out to have been a woman who served for years as a man undetected. The area is lovely and pastoral amid snow-capped mountains, with many other worthy attractions, but I’m on the road again.

Taos Pueblo

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Taos Pueblo has been continuously occupied for over 1,000 years—perhaps far longer—, much older than European settlements, and it is a World Heritage Site. Archaeologists have not extensively excavated the area—because the Red Willow people are still living there—, but there is evidence of trade with Mesa Verde and other early Native American settlements dating back many centuries. The multistory building above is home to many families, and folks on the upper floors climb ladders to access their apartments. While modern doors and windows have been added, the families, community and tribal government preserve the village in its original form, using mostly traditional building materials and avoiding electricity and plumbing anywhere within the village.

The pueblo sits below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a significant portion of which were returned to the community by President Nixon, including the Blue Lake and the headwaters of the Red Willow Creek. The creek runs through the middle of the village, is the sole source of water and flows into the Rio Grande. The Rio Grande Gorge southwest of Taos is strikingly beautiful, as are the Palisades near Eagle’s Nest northeast. The pueblos in this area are at the crossroads of ancient trading routes from coast to coast and to Central America.

Taos means Red Willow in the Tiwa language, and it is a town in an area crowded with history. Coronado arrived in 1540, and the Spanish built the first San Geronimo Church in 1620. When their Native dances, songs and worship were prohibited, the people here joined the Pueblo Revolt, which destroyed this any many other churches and forced the Spanish to retreat to what is now Mexico. The Spanish eventually reconquered the area and rebuilt the church. After the Spanish were forced to cede their territory to end the Spanish American War, the US Cavalry eventually was sent to subdue the people, who took refuge in the church. There were no survivors of the artillery bombardment, and the old church grounds are now a cemetery. The new San Geronimo Church contains a statue of the Virgin Mary from the old church, and the villagers practice both their indigenous Nature-focused religion and Catholicism with indigenous elements.

The locals give tours, sell handicrafts and run bakeries and cafes. Al’Thloo’s (grandmother’s) Cafe serves excellent Piñon Coffee and a Taos Pueblo Taco on freshly baked Frybread. The proprietress explained that the creek is currently near record flooding, due to the unnatural heat this Spring, and she informed me about the havoc that the Climate Crisis is having on snowpack, wildfires, drought, irrigation, crops and ranching. Her husband fought in WWII, and her family has been involved in supporting Native American causes for decades from here to Standing Rock. I wish more people were as clear-eyed and passionate as she is.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

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While not as long as Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad is larger in terms of volume, and both are World Heritage Sites. The ceilings are often over a hundred feet high, and the Big Room spans over 8 acres, with a mile-long loop to see it. Even after descending 750 feet down the natural entrance, there are still deeper “bottomless” pits below. I was fairly sure I heard faint drumbeats coming up from the darkness, so I asked the rangers. They explained that there were only a few goblins, and that they try to catch them as they’re considered “invasive species”. I finished the hike as quickly as possible and took the elevator up.

Capulin Volcano National Monument

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I don’t always plan my schedule well enough. I made it to this park about 30 minutes before closing, but just after they closed the volcano road to the top, which is why I took this photo from near the visitor center. Sometimes parks will let you drive out before sunset on your own after the visitor center closes, but apparently the volcano road is narrow and restricted to hikers for the last couple hours of daylight. I should have checked the hours more carefully, and I should have planned an extra day or two on this leg of my trip. I actually had to postpone two planned stops until next time in order to get back on track. I think volcanoes remind me of devastation more than renewal, so I tend to de-prioritize them when planning. Oh well, sometimes we need to admit our mistakes, so we can do better in the future, if we still have time. There’s a broader lesson in that.

Fort Union National Monument

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Not much remains of the largest Union fort in the west. But there’s plenty of history here. This was a critical supply base to keep the Confederacy from expanding into the southwest. Some of the Navajo who were driven from their homes during the Long Walk were imprisoned here. Here was the largest and most advanced hospital in the west. Soldiers and cavalry guarded both branches of the Santa Fe trail from here, once trading and migration routes for Natives, then for settlers whose wagon ruts can still be seen in the earth, then for the mail, and finally for the railroad, which still bears the name in the logo BNSF.

On the drive out to the site, a pronghorn stood in the road and stared at me, perhaps not frightened by my relatively quiet and zero emission electric car. Although I didn’t get a photo, I got a careful look at it and confirmed its identity with the park volunteer. Turns out they’re not antelope but related to giraffe. Again, everything I learned about the west, where “the antelope play” was wrong. There aren’t any antelope in North America. The pronghorn are the last survivors of human hunting among similar species in North America, due to their speed. Humans are increasingly lethal to all other species, and by changing our climate so quickly, we will make most species on earth extinct within a few decades. I wonder what our ancestors who traveled this trail would say if they could see how quickly we are devastating the planet.

Pecos National Historical Park

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Yes, I know this is another Kiva photo. But I learned something important on the ranger tour down here. One of the visitors was an engineer, and he explained that one reason that the Native Americans built round buildings below ground level and square buildings above ground, even within the same pueblo, is that circular walls are the most efficient way to hold back the pressure of the dirt. When building up above ground, it’s easier to balance walls using right angles. That’s one reason why I saw round ball courts at Wupatki, round pit dwellings at more primitive sites and round kivas at important ceremonial sites, even as the majority of buildings at the same sites are rectangular.

Pecos is fascinating for multiple reasons, which explains why it was promoted to a historic park. One being that the archaeologists who excavated the pueblo roughly 100 years ago sent many human remains to Harvard University and Andover Academy for study, and they were repatriated in 1999, mainly reburied near relatives at a nearby pueblo community. Another is that here is where the Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish was planned and executed in 1680. Furious over their treatment by the domineering missionaries, the Native Americans orchestrated simultaneous uprisings across the southwest in the largest and only truly successful Native uprising against a colonial power in North America. And if that wasn’t enough, Pecos is also the site of the Civil War battle of Glorieta Pass, which prevented the Confederacy from taking over the southwest. As the Russians are belatedly learning in Ukraine, it all came down to supply line logistics. Kudos to the park ranger for explaining everything.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park

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This is the third park unit right near Los Alamos, the others being the last two visits at Bandelier and Valles Caldera. There are Los Alamos National Labs units all around the area, and I was even stopped at a security checkpoint when Tesla’s navigation misdirected me (not the first time). I stayed in the neighboring town of Española, and there’s a Native American community right next door too. I got a bit of culture shock again seeing how different lives are between communities that are so close to each other physically.

Los Alamos is very strange. First, according to a local, most of the science workers are introverts and the other workers spend the weekends in Santa Fe nearby. So the town has all these big shopping plazas with a variety of (often Asian) restaurants, but they’re all virtually empty on weekends. The place is beautifully landscaped with flowering trees, manicured lawns, pristine sidewalks and a lovely park next to the visitor centers. If it weren’t so American, I would suspect it of being a Potemkin village. There are actually two small visitor centers practically right next door to each other, one for the park service and one for the town, so I visited both. They both recommended the exact same attractions in the same helpful and enthusiastic, smiling way with almost identical maps.

Also strangely, although it was atomic scientists who invented the atomic clock as a way to standardize time across all different clocks, the Bradbury Science Museum mobile website ironically doesn’t display its hours of operation (they said they would fix that). They have an incredible amount of information, but they won’t tell visitors when they’re open. Now that my trip is over, I can see the hours on my desktop computer: Tues-Sat 10am to 5pm and Sun 1 to 5pm. And while the museum had an exhibit on wildfires and an exhibit on climate change, they almost seemed to be avoiding making a connection between the two. The climate exhibit was all about Arctic research, implying that climate change was going on there, but the wildfire exhibit was about fire safety, implying that fires were simply natural and avoidable events. As I write this, the Cerro Pelado fire is six miles from the Lab and is over 20,000 acres, so they might want to reprioritize how they assess the threat of climate change.

And finally, I’m going to break my own rule and add a second picture. Dr Oppenheimer and several of the other top scientists lived in converted scouts’ cabins after the government confiscated an elite boys camp to build nuclear weapons. In his neighbor’s cabin, next to the kitchen, is a realistic display of a miniature version created in the 1980’s: the scariest thing I’ve seen besides the climate crisis, a nuclear bomb designed to be carried in a backpack.

Valles Caldera National Preserve

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Like much of the west, wildfires have burned large areas in and near the preserve. I didn’t see any wildlife, so we’re obviously failing at the “preserve”. As we irreparably damage the environment with climate pollution, the snowpack diminishes and living things die. Many people enjoy seeing national parks that focus on geologic wonders, culture and historic sites. But it is the wildlife that draws me most. Even besides the massive carbon burning that dooms most life on earth, we destroy habitats and hunt species to extinction.

As I drive across the country, I pass through forests I know will burn, I cross rivers and valleys that have been sucked dry, and I know that no matter how unseasonably hot it is, it will only get worse for the rest of my life. Once maybe we could have pretended that we wanted to live in harmony with nature, but now that the climate crisis is upon us and we’re still not doing anything about it, we should at least be honest enough to admit what we’ve done wrong and that collectively we’re too short-sighted, corrupt, selfish, ignorant and stupid to do anything about it in time. What makes me most sad is to listen to people who claim to care about nature, while they drive around in a big rig that is contributing to mass extinctions.

Bandelier National Monument

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While it is easy to see the impressive semi-circular pueblo ruins on the valley floor and peek in the various rooms along the canyon wall, Alcove House was open to those willing to hike a bit further and climb the series of steep ladders 140 feet up. I imagine it would have been much more difficult carrying supplies, children or elderly relatives up the ladders when the Native Americans were living here. There’s a creek running down the canyon from the large volcano which makes a pleasant place to consider the climb or to cool down on the hike back.

Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument

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I chose to visit Gran Quivara, since it has the largest pueblo ruins of the three missions, although the churches are better preserved at the other monument sites. The original pueblo ruins are in the foreground. The Spanish claimed the land for the King and forced the people here to build two churches, first the low ruin to the left and then the taller structure in the back. Some accounts describe the relations between the natives here and the Spanish as friendly and positive. From what I can tell, it’s hardly a coincidence that the pueblo was abandoned a few years after they started constructing the larger church for the missionaries. The local people endured Spanish diseases, grew Spanish plants that were ill adapted to the drought-stricken area, and other native tribes mistreated or attacked them as collaborators. They were prohibited from practicing their own religion, including singing native songs or performing dances, due to the strict rules of the Spanish Inquisition. If I had to go through any of that, I would leave too.