A walk with Dad at Bandelier National Monument, not far from Santa Fe

Santa Fe is a wonderful destination for kids of all ages, but when the younger ones come along, sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to find something that will engage them in new ways. Art galleries and elegant restaurants only go so far with this crowd! But we have the perfect solution for you: Bandelier National Monument. What child can fail to be fascinated by kid-sized caves dug out of towering cliffs and entered by ladders?

What's in here?

Just about the right height for me!

Bandelier’s cliffs and towering Ponderosa pines are tall enough to make anyone feel like a child:

Investigating cliff dwellings along the Long House Trail

And it only gets better. You won’t be able to keep the monkey-bar set off the 140 feet of ladders up to the Ceremonial Cave!

Let's go!

A triumphant ascent

Budding photographers – even the young cynical ones – will find plenty of subject matter in Bandelier:

Hunting down the devil squirrel

The thing about a family vacation is, you never know when the magical moment will arrive. This is all so b o o o r r i n g – until it isn’t:

Whoa!

OMG! Did you see that? She was coming right for me!

So don’t hesitate to bring your family out our way. We’ll send you off for all sorts of adventures.

On to the next stop!

Getting there:

The National Park Service has this useful link giving directions to the Monument from Santa Fe and Taos: Getting There. It’s just shy of an hour’s drive from the Inn on the Alameda, and much of the drive – especially the part from the Pueblo of Pojoaque to the park – is especially beautiful. You might want to leave some time for a drive up over the mountain to the Valle Grande National Preserve – it’s only about a half-hour’s drive west of Bandelier – and you can always make a stop in Los Alamos on your way back to Santa Fe, where there’s a free museum: the Bradbury Science Museum, a very kid-friendly bookstore: the Otowi Station, and most importantly, a Starbucks. With bathrooms.

Gambel Oak leaves in autumn light

Deer photographs courtesy of Britt Renbarger. Your uncle thanks you.

Hiking in the Pecos Wilderness

Autumn has to be the best time to take walks and hikes in the Southern Rockies. The weather is mild, the sunshine glorious, and the inconvenience of an afternoon thunderstorm minimized. The aspen put on their annual fall spectacular – they’re at their peak here on the Santa Fe side of the mountains – and the plants on the floor of the forest take on all sorts of autumnal colors, in counterpoint to the mostly yellow leaves of the aspen. Our forests are relatively dry and radiant with light, especially this time of year, and the intense sunshine distills seductive aromatics from the aspen leaves and spruce needles, to the point where you may find yourself drifting down the trail in an almost blissed-out state.

Unfortunately there is so much else going on here in Northern New Mexico that you may find trouble budgeting for a walk, with all the choices you’ll have to make. I’m thinking particularly of the wonderful artist studio tours which occur on practically every weekend now. That’s my excuse, anyway, for the brevity of this week’s entry, as well as my choice for a hike: the Pecos Studio Tour opened this past weekend, and there was an artist a friend of mine simply had to see. Studio tours are great. Not only do you get to talk to the artist in his or her natural habitat, you get to poke your nose in peoples’ gardens and kitchens and studios and bedrooms, and meet their dogs, cats, parrots, goats, turtles, doves, etc, etc, and see how they’ve rigged their water catchment systems, and so on. Fascinating!

Anyway, being in the Pecos area, which is the gateway to the enormous Pecos Wilderness just to the north and east of Santa Fe, a drive north up to Cowles – the jumping off spot for hikes and trail rides deep into the wilderness – immediately suggested itself. There wasn’t time for a long hike, and it’s a 20 mile drive from Pecos back in to Cowles, so we chose a relatively short two-mile walk up Panchuela and Cave Creeks, to see the little caves for which the creek is named. Caves have a sort of elemental attraction to geologists and nature mystics, and they aren’t all that common in our part of the state, so off we went.

The first cave entrance along Cave Creek

The trailhead for this hike is clearly marked at the end of the Panchuela campground just above Cowles – here is a link for the trail you can print – and at least for the first two miles to the caves it’s an easy walk with a gentle increase in elevation. In another two miles or so, the trail leaves the creek and makes a steep climb out of the drainage and up onto the soft flattened summits of the thickly wooded mesas that characterize the southern part of the wilderness. If you have any energy – and time – left after this ascent, you can follow a branch of the trail into the uplift of granite that forms the backbone of the Santa Fe Range, and switchback up to Lake Johnson, one of the least visited of the glacial lakes in the wilderness.

But that’s for another time. The caves make a perfect place to stop and have a snack, and maybe pull out the nature journal for a sketch or two:

Yours truly in front of the mountain's nostrils

The gentler parts of the Pecos Wilderness are cut out of a vast thickness of Pennsylvanian strata deposited back when Santa Fe sat nearly on the Equator, and blue mountains shimmered in the hot sun above glittering inlets of a tropical sea. Layer upon layer of sand – some of it coarse and pebbly – and mud accumulated in the shallow water, washed out of an early edition of the Rocky Mountains called the “Ancestral Rockies“. During those times when the water clarified, limy beds  - many full of fossilized brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoans, and horn corals – interpolated themselves between the soon-to-be sandstones and shales. It is in a rather crinkly bedded cliff of these limestones that the caves occur.  The creek crowds up against the ledge, and disappears into pits that have formed like dental cavities right at the gum line, so to speak, of the limestone. (Limestone is a rock that is soluble in the slightly acidic groundwater of a forest floor and hence prone to cave-forming.)

When it dawns on you that the merry sound of the creek you’ve been following for a mile has stopped, and when you realize you are now walking along a suspiciously dry creek bed, it is time to start looking for the caves. You’ll find them on the left side of the trail, up against the cliffs, just about the time you hear water gurgling again.

Even without these mysterious entrances to the underworld to entice you along, Cave Creek makes a nice walk.

A little waterfall on Panchuela Creek along the way

Judging by all the rose hips and iris stalks along the trails, this canyon must be an absolute garden of wildflowers in early summer. Plenty of water pours down Panchuela and Cave Creeks, even at this dry time of year, and that always makes for a pleasant walk in the summer and fall. We were a little early for the aspen on this side of the range:

A grove of aspen just beginning to turn

In another week these trees will be dazzling. On our side of the mountains, up at Aspen Vista and Big Tesuque, the trees are at their peak of color, and I can’t wait to get up there. That is, if I can tear myself away from the Pilar Studio Tour, and the Farmer’s Market, and the train ride down to Albuquerque, and the newly restored CCC Visitor’s Center at Bandelier, and . .

Getting there:

There are several ways of accessing the Pecos Wilderness from Santa Fe, as you can see here. Read up on “access from the south” for this hike. Just as you reach the tiny town of Cowles, you’ll see a bridge crossing over the Pecos River, which you’ll take, followed by a very sharp right uphill on the narrow road to the Panchuela Campground. It’s about a mile and a half from the turning. Be sure and bring $2 to pay the day use fee to park at the campground.

We didn’t think to bring a flashlight, but you can scramble into the caves a short distance. I have to mention that water drains freely into the entrances, which looked clogged and muddy a short way in and not inviting at all. I recommend staying outside in the sunshine.

Like all trails in the Pecos Wilderness, you may be sharing with horses and their riders. Pack rides and overnighters are very popular here. Just be ready to step aside for a short while as the riders pass.

Since this is a State Park, there is a $5 day use fee, payable at the parking area near the entrance of the park. There are no camping facilities.

Apache Plume in full headdress in the Cerrillos Hills

We are moving rapidly into summer, here in the Southern Rockies, and the natural world is bursting with activity. My favorite change can be seen from here in Santa Fe, looking up into the Sangre de Cristo  Mountains to the east: the grey expanses of aspen high on the mountains are donning their bright yellow-green coat, with the usual suddenness that never fails to impress me. It’s a look as soft as the fuzz on an elk’s new antler, and as welcome as summer itself. 

The alchemy of change is strong up there among the leafing aspen, and this is that brief moment of transition when the fairies appear in the forest. By which I mean, the fairy flowers; those two species that seem the most fairy-like of all our woodland flowers here – the diminutive Red Columbine, and the elusive Calypso Orchid.

Red columbines along the Winsor Trail above Santa Fe

A flower like this, bright red, with nectaries perched well up into tubes, is naturally pollinated by hummingbirds, and you can hear the flying jewels chattering under the forest canopy and whirring about. The complexity of this flower is fascinating:

Hummingbird's view of a columbine

Even more intriguing are the ephemeral Calypso orchids, or fairy slippers. After finding just one of these, years ago, along the Bear Wallow Trail, I have been searching in vain for another look. Our wet winter must have been the key to my luck this year, because I found an entire cluster of these beauties:

Calypso bulbosa along the Winsor Trail

This orchid has a surprisingly sweet fragrance, although I have to warn you that you’ll have to put your head practically on the forest floor to enjoy it.

Meanwhile, here below, in the more arid hills, a tougher set of flowers is showing off its resiliency. Our newest State Park, the Cerrillos Hills State Park, south of Santa Fe, has been offering a variety of nature walks, and this past Sunday the park’s ranger Sarah Wood led a wildflower walk along the Jane Calvin Sanchez Trail. The walk was very well attended; I think nearly 40 people showed up.

Wildflower walk in the Cerrillos Hills, south of Santa Fe

You’d be surprised at the number of flowers that bloom in this harsh environment. There were far more species flowering here than up under the aspen. Sarah gave us the lowdown on the most abundant of these:

Sarah and the Narrow Leaf Yucca

And she talked about the native grasses, another set of flowering plants many of us overlook:

Grass flowers are tiny

There were splashes of color everywhere:

Paintbrush growing among the rocks

Verbena

 This was a very pleasant way to spend part of a Sunday afternoon.

You can keep track of activities like these by visiting the State Park’s event website . And if you prefer to explore on your own, local bookstores like the Travel Bug, or Collected Works, or the Nature Center at the Randall Davey Audubon Center have good selections of guidebooks, from the most basic pamphlets, to tomes only a botanist could love.

Getting There: Cerrillos Hills State Park is about 25 miles south of Santa Fe, just a couple of miles off of Highway 14, the famous “Turquoise Trail” that connects Santa Fe to the eastern outskirts of Albuquerque. Turn into the scenic little village of Cerrillos, and then turn right at the sleeping dog – er, first stop sign, and follow the dirt road past the railroad tracks and Broken Saddle Riding Company to the park. Be sure and bring $5 to pay the day use fee.

Trail name: Rio En Medio: map link here.

Recommended seasons: The lower part of this trail is an all-seasons trail, although it can be icy in winter. There are a number of shallow water crossings and you’re likely to get your feet wet in spring runoff so plan accordingly. A walking stick helps with the crossings. Dogs (on leashes) and mountain bikes are permitted.

The parking at the lower, western trailhead is very limited.

Small cascades along the Rio En Medio

A walk along the lower parts of the Rio En Medio Trail is one of the more pleasant hikes you can make in the Santa Fe area, especially now that the weather is warming up. This trail practically defines the words “riparian environment” for me. At no time do you leave the pleasant gurgling music of the little creek, born far above, practically in the parking area of Ski Santa Fe, and the shade, the mix of vegetation – so different from the arid hills literally a few steps away from the trail – and the spectacle of an unexpected waterfall about a mile and a half up the walk all make this a very rewarding excursion.

The weather in Santa Fe was perfect on Sunday, far too nice to spend on any mundane yard work, and the Rio En Medio hike suggested itself immediately. The trailhead is about 14 miles north of Santa Fe, and the drive requires you to cruise through the little village of Tesuque, so if you haven’t packed a lunch, stop at the popular Tesuque Village Market for something to carry along. Their Dream Bars are. . . dreamy. A turn on NM 592 just beyond the village sends you into picturesque badlands and eventually brings you to a tiny trailhead, maintained by the National Forest Service, just past the little settlement of Rio En Medio.

The trail winds through bright green thickets of willow, river birch, and Rocky Mountain maple that cluster along the creek. In many places it passes through dark groves of Gambel Oak that grow out of the canyon walls. Some of these groves are so twisty and tangled that a friend and I call it the “Witches Forest”:

Tangles of Gambel Oak along the Rio En Medio Trail

Most of the trail is as cheerful as can be. There is an amazing show of Canadian violets this year:

Canadian violets

In places the canyon opens up a into tiny meadows that host sunny, fragrant groves of Ponderosa pine:

Ponderosa pines along the Rio En Medio

Some of these pines are impressively big, with thick, cinnamon-colored plates of bark:

An old Ponderosa

And if you haven’t done it before, this is the time of year to put your nose up to these thick boles and breathe in – you’ll get a very pleasant surprise.

One oddity I’ve noticed in the stream-laced canyons of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains here in Northern New Mexico is the occasional apple tree, growing far from cultivation. They are blooming now, in practically bridal bouquets:

Apple blossoms

Are they escapes, or are they remnants of old settlements far up here in the mountains?

About a mile and a half from the trailhead, the canyon walls begin to crowd together, and if you manage to keep to the creek – and don’t mind getting you feet wet – you can enter a small slot canyon carved into the granite and gneiss:

The "Little Chasm" along the Rio En Medio

And at the end of this box is a bright cascade of water, and a good place to have a snack:

Little Chasm Falls on the Rio En Medio

The main trail actually skirts this slot in the rocks and switchbacks up a steep outcropping of granite, with views of the falls from above. The trail continues much further along the creek and eventually brings you up to Ski Santa Fe, but I haven’t walked the entire length of the path. I do know that there is a very charming series of cascades above the waterfall, so you might want to keep on going a bit to see these.

Of course, I can’t leave you without mentioning the rocks. The Rio En Medio cuts its way through the tough crystalline rocks of the Santa Fe Range, and there are plenty of glittering fragments of metamorphic and granitic rocks along the path. But keep your eye peeled for an unusual variety of granite pegmatite called graphic granite, which I often find on a walk here:

A fragment of graphic granite on the forest floor

The intimate intergrowth of pink feldspar and grey quartz mimics runes or cuneiform writing, hence the name.

This is also a great walk for those birders out there, and if you are interested in butterflies, you’ll find them in abundance here. The Rio En Medio Trail is generous with everybody.

Getting there: From the Inn, take Paseo de Peralta north and around to its intersection with Bishop’s Lodge Road. Turn right, and follow Bishop’s Lodge Road north out of Santa Fe, through the village of Tesuque, to its intersection with NM 592. There is no stop sign or light at this intersection; look for the sign directing you to the Auberge Encantado resort. Follow this winding road into the village of Rio En Medio, about 5.5 miles away, and pass through the village on a very narrow, but paved road to the Forest Service Trailhead. Parking is extremely limited so you may have to be “creative” – but please abide by the wishes of the residents in the mouth of the canyon.

Colorado Plateau scenery from the Rim Vista Trail

One of the most rewarding day trips you can make during your visit to Santa Fe is an excursion up to the village of Abiquiu and beyond, past Georgia O’Keeffe’s house (where you might want to pre-arrange a tour) and into Ghost Ranch, where you are always welcome to stop at the Presbyterian Retreat Center and stretch your legs, or even have a picnic, surrounded by the spectacular pastel cliffs that drew Ms. O’Keeffe into their embrace for so many years: (more…)

The cliff face above the Upper Falls, Bandelier National Monument

No, that is not a typo. A maar is a type of volcano. New Mexico is infested with them, statistically speaking. By now you may have noticed that I seem to talk about volcanoes and volcanic features rather often. It’s impossible not to do so – New Mexico should have been called the Volcano State rather than the Land of Enchantment. You can hardly look out your window anywhere in New Mexico without seeing something volcanic. Here’s a link you have to check out: Volcanoes of New Mexico. As the article says, New Mexico has “one of the largest numbers, the largest diversity of type, the largest range of preservation, and some of the best type examples” of volcanoes in the North American continent. We even have a bun in the oven, so to speak, smack dab in the middle of the state: the Socorro Magma Body. This is a mid-crustal sill of magma that is slowly, but actively, inflating beneath the city of Socorro, New Mexico and surrounding areas, one of only three such features in the United States – and the only one that hasn’t expressed itself at the surface. Yet.

A maar is shallow, flat-floored volcanic crater formed by violent steam explosions, caused when ascending magma meets water at or near the Earth’s surface. The eruption at the surface is confined to these explosions, which toss out great quantities of loose, water-sodden sediment mixed with shattered fragments of chilled magma and the occasional bit of exotic rock torn from the deeper crust. No great cone of lava is built, and in fact the low crater, usually only a mile to two across, typically fills with water to form a shallow, circular lake. Such relatively modest features don’t last long here at the surface, where weathering and erosion work relentlessly, so if you find a maar it’s probably pretty young. Geologically restless New Mexico has a world-class collection of maars, in all stages of preservation, and just west of Santa Fe, the Rio Grande River and its short tributaries have cut canyons right through an entire pock-marked field of these things, preserved by burial under the lavas of the Caja del Rio Volcanoes.

One of these short tributaries is the beautiful canyon of the Rito de Frijoles, which forms the centerpiece of Bandelier National Monument west of Santa Fe.

A walk among the Ponderosa on the Falls Trail in Bandelier

This lovely canyon, which is mostly cut in the orange and pink deposits of the Bandelier Tuff, is accessible from end to end, nearly, by trails which start at the Visitor’s Center. The most popular trail heads up canyon to the Ceremonial Cave, with its 140 feet of ladders pinned to the cliffs and the restored kiva in its alcove far above. But if you head down canyon, you will be treated to a number of wonderful sights along the so-called Falls Trail: meadows full of towering Ponderosa pine, the chortling music of the Rito de Frijoles, two waterfalls, a remarkable transition from woodlands to arid canyon vegetation, and some beautiful color in the autumn. You can follow this trail all the way down to the Rio Grande if you like, although the last bit is in a sloggy delta covered in dead junipers (once flooded by the lake behind Cochiti Dam) that I prefer to avoid.

For years I hiked down this trail and wondered at the tall cliffs of contorted lava above the waterfalls, which protect a softer wall of obviously stratified material, orange, buff, white, and grey, that could not contrast more strikingly with the somber rocks above. And this stratified stuff didn’t fall into any easy categories of sedimentary rocks I’d seen before: no water-cut channels, no dune or bar-like features, a weird regularity of bedding and the oddest mix of volcanic particles with regular sand, and – strangest of all – rough boulders of basalt sitting right in the middle of the beds, with the layers below bent down and contorted, as if someone had just thrown them there. 

Finally I learned that I was actually walking inside of a volcano. Frijoles Canyon has cut a perfect cross section into the flanks of a maar, and the stratified beds are the remains of the wet sediment and shattered lava flung out by explosion after explosion of steam caused by an injection of magma into the floodplain of an ancestral Rio Grande. The gently sloping layers are punctuated by volcanic bombs ejected by explosions beneath the riverbed and hurled down onto the flanks of the growing tuff ring, as it is sometime called. That explained my mysterious boulders.

But it gets even better. Look at this photograph:

The curving crater of the maar, filled with a lava lake

Just below the Upper Falls, you can actually see the curving interior of the crater of the maar, which has been filled with layers of lava, interbedded with scoria. The shallow crater filled with small lakes of lava! And if you turn around you will see this:

Upper Falls of the Rito de Frijoles

It’s very likely that the Upper Falls is cascading down the lava-choked throat of the vent that fed the maar in the first place. Amazing!

All of these features are preserved by thick flows of contorted andesite that form the cliffs above:

Cliffs towering above the Upper and Lower Falls

Andesite is a lava rather closely related to basalt, but with a higher silica content. Don’t quote me on this, but I think of andesite as ‘contaminated’ basalt – basalt that has incorporated lighter material from the crustal rocks through which it has leaked upwards. You can see in the picture that these lavas have a ‘sticky’ component, by the way they are thickened and contorted, rather than showing the flattened ‘runny’ layers characteristic of basalt lavas. But I always found these particular rocks puzzling, since they are nearly as dark as basalt and full of tiny crystals of olivine – that component of the Earth’s mantle whose presence nearly always shouts ‘basalt’! Oh well, no one said igneous petrology was straightforward.

In any case, what an opportunity it is, to be able to see a volcano from the inside out, as you can do here on a lovely trail not far from Santa Fe. It’s just one more reason to visit Bandelier National Monument when you come out to see us, here in maar-velous New Mexico.