Hiking Tour in Bandelier National Monument

This is a day of stepping back into the world that came before the living pueblos of the Rio Grande. Beneath the eastern flanks of the Jemez Mountains lies the Pajarito Plateau, "little bird" in Spanish, a landscape shaped by ancient volcanic eruptions many times the force of Mount St. Helens. All that violence left behind soft, porous rock called tuff, and into it ancestral Puebloan people carved and built their homes, leaving cliff dwellings, petroglyphs, and pathways that still speak across the centuries.

The day begins in the morning hush at Tsankawi, a quieter, separate section of the monument where the story of the ancestral Tewa people began in the 1400s. Here you walk a 1.5-mile path along the mesa top, past low stone walls and rock carvings, following footholds and three ladders worn and cut into the tuff by people who climbed them every day. It is the right place to slow down and feel the age of the landscape before the canyon opens up.

From there you shuttle south into Frijoles Canyon, where the anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, seeing it in 1880, called it "the grandest thing I ever saw." After a picnic lunch beneath the cottonwoods along Frijoles Creek, you set out on the canyon floor, past the great circular village of Tyuonyi and up narrow stairs to the cliff dwellings and the Long House, homes built right into the canyon wall. By the end, the living pueblos of New Mexico read entirely differently, because you have stood in the places their story began.