Weather aside, this was a great day. Showers in the morning did not interfere with our activities and the afternoon turned out mostly sunny. We decided to take a loop tour recommended in one of the tourist magazines provided by the campground. The tour would take us most of the day and covered roughly 175 miles.
We left Santa Fe heading northwest to San Ildefonso Pueblo. The Pueblo allows tourists to walk through some of their streets and take pictures. San Ildefonso and some of the other Pueblos charges a fee for access and photo permit. It was a brief walk since the open part of the Pueblo is limited to the area of the Visitors Center and Plaza. San Ildefonso has a number of potters who have shops within the area permitted to tourists. Each Pueblo has a different style of pottery and the colors are dependent on the materials used by the Pueblo and firing methods. San Ildefonso pottery is unique in that most of the objects they make are a polished black.
From San Idefonso we made our way to Bandelier National Monument. We limited our visit to Frijoles Canyon, which has a 1 1/2 mile loop trail that took us to Ancestral Pueblos dwellings. The Ancestral Pueblo people were the predecessors to today's Pueblo people. There are a number of dwelling remnants along the loop, including the village of Tyuonyi, an "apartment complex" formed around a circular plaza, and two cliff dwellings, Talus Houses and Long House..
We then went to Los Alamos, best known as the home of World War II Manhattan project which developed the atomic bomb. Los Alamos National Laboratory is still the dominant part of the community. Since our interest were related to the Native American communities of the area, we had lunch and continued on to our next stop, Jemez Pueblo.
The route to Jemez Pueblo took us over the Jemez Mountains, topping off at 9,200 feet. When we started our voyage today we were in the hgh desert at about 6,000 feet. The Jemez Mountains are a completely different environment, with tall pines. Traveling through the mountains, we saw evidence of the serious forest fire that burned here a few years ago and threatened Los Alamos. One of the most striking features along the route is Valle Grande, a series of meadows that is one of the world's largest calderas, the collapsed crater of a volcano that blew up over a million years ago. The explosion of this volcano was 500 times greater than the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980. The explosion covered the area with over a thousand feet of ash that compacted into a rock called tuff. Over time the rock eroded and formed terrain we crossed and the "swiss cheese" holes that were the base for some of the cliff dwelling.
Jemez Pueblo was our last stop on our tour. Susie has a number of storytellers that were made by artists from Jemez. We stopped at the visitors center, which had a gallery selling work by local artists. Yesterday I mentioned how I breathed a sigh of relief when Susie didn't like anything she saw in the Santa Fe galleries. Today my luck ran out... she liked a number of things.
