venturing4th: Bandelier National Monument & LANL

The Santa Fe Skies RV park has a steady stream of Airstreams coming through to enjoy the area. When we moved in last Saturday there were already 3 other Airstreams here. One was parked four spots down from us in the Marigold row. On Monday morning, Lou and Pat Santoro knocked on our door, introduced themselves as having that Airstream and asked if they could talk to us about our 30ft International Serenity model. They have a 30ft Flying Cloud and were trying to decide between an International Serenity, like ours, or a Classic model. They came in and we talked Airstreams and our experience as full timers.

Lou and Pat Santoro and their wonderful dog Sophie.

Yesterday we paid a return visit and they told us they had just put in their order for a new International Serenity. We also learned that they were from Los Alamos, NM, which is about 50 miles west of Santa Fe. Lou and Pat encouraged us to visit Los Alamos, it has a great science museum, and is located adjacent to the Bandelier National Monument. Today we drove over to visit Los Alamos and Bandelier.

The scenery on the drive over was stunning and we could see why when the top-secret Manhattan Project sprang to life in 1943, it came to this isolated , sleepy village and turned it into a busy laboratory of secluded brainiacs. Los Alamos has the highest concentration of PhDs per capita in the US, along with highest per capita income in New Mexico.

You can't actually visit the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was conceived, but the Bradbury Science Museum has displays on bomb development and atomic history.

The Bradbury Science Museum was not named for Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) but for Norris Bradbury, Los Alamos National Laboratory Director from 1948 - 1970. Humanity can trace some of its greatest achievements and darkest fears directly to this little town and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The LANL still develops weapons, but it's also at the cutting edge of other scientific discoveries, including mapping the human genome and making mind-boggling supercomputing advances.

The Bradbury Museum was a tad sobering, especially on this Earth Day so moving outdoors to the Bandelier National Monument, 12 miles south of Los Alamos, lifted our spirits. The peach-colored cliffs of Frijoles Canyon, above, is pocked with caves and alcoves that were home to Ancestral Puebloans until the mid-1500s.

From the Visitor Center we took the Main Loop Trail the took us past numerous Ancestral Pueblo dwellings, petroglyphs and kivas, such as the Big Kiva above and...

here.

We walked up Frijoles Canyon past Tyuonyi Pueblo...

on the floor of Frijoles Canyon, which was...

inhabited at the same time as the...

cliff dwellings built along the base of the canyon walls.

(Enlarge the picture to see the ladders leading to the cavates.)

Short ladders enabled us to clamber into...

the individual homes.

Continuing along the base of the canyon,

we came to homes built from the rubble at the base of the canyon walls.

Looking back down on the Tyuonyi Pueblo.

Entering a

cliff dwelling.

Further along, we approached the...

Long House...

a sort of apartment house of cliff dwellings.

Petroglyphs are carved on the surface just above...

the holes where the roof poles were inserted into the canyon wall. The speculation is that the people stood on their roofs to carve the petroglyphs.

This is my favorite - a turkey. The Ancestral Pueblo People did raise turkeys.

Continuing along the canyon floor we reached the Ceremonial Cave, poised 140ft above the ground and reached by climbing four long ladders. If you enlarge the picture you might see the people climbing the ladders at center left.