Bandolier National Monument. Amazing.

When we were looking for day trips outside Santa Fe, we drove to nearby Bandolier National Monument. We enjoyed the day so much we decided to leave Santa Fe Hyde Memorial Campground (which was a bit noisy and required us to haul in our own water due to problems with their water system) and spend 3 days in Bandolier's Juniper Campground. $6 per day with a Senior Pass - can't beat that! And this well maintained, updated campground has a shuttle bus that takes you to the Visitor's Center and trails!  Plus we became friends with a Colorado couple in the next campsite and very much enjoyed their company while there.

The Ancestral Puebloans who first inhabited the Frijoles Canyon here scooped shelters out of the south-facing rock wall and built 2 and 3 story dwellings against the cliff wall floor, using mortised holes in the rock to hold horizontal poles to support roofs. 

Many of the cliff dwellings can be entered by ladder

This shows the remains of some of the dwellings built at ground-level against the cliff. "Long House" is an 800 foot stretch of such dwellings, including the windows and doors on previous upper floors and the regularly-spaced holes that held the roof beams. You can see these better below...

A closer photo of the cliff wall. The rooms behind the walls are usually tiny, but often interconnected.

Above the highest stories on the cliff wall are many petroglyphs and pictographs of human figures, animals and other abstract symbols. 

Me climbing a ladder

From the height of the cliff dwellings you get a good view of the remains of Tyuonyi (meaning Place of Agreement)  - a circular, originally multistory 400-room village structure that was probably used mostly for trade and storage. 

We did a lot of hiking and walking here, despite noon-day temperatures in the 90s.  Carried lots of water and sunscreen.  One night after sundown we did a guided night walk to the part of the canyon with cliff dwellings, which had been lit by torches and had someone playing drums up there.  It was a moonless and overcast night - very black. This park is normally wonderful for stargazing because of the lack of interfering lights from populated areas. 

One day we walked 5 miles (round-trip) to a waterfall which you can just barely see here in the center of the photo. It was a pretty deep and narrow part of the canyon, and the falls were quite loud, even from a distance. Water in the Frijoles Canyon is almost always present - important for the people who lived and settled here since the water supported the growth of trees, plants and animals used for food, medicine, building materials, clothing and other needs.  Right now construction is underway at the river bed to prevent future damage from floods. In 2011 and 2013, enormous volumes of water (like 1,000 times the normal volume per minute) carried tons of logs and other debris down the river.  Huge piles of this debris are still everywhere along the riverbed.