Part 3

The items of wearing apparel most important to the early people, perhaps, were sandals. In the Southwest it is difficult, if not out of the question, to go barefoot outdoors; even the toughened Indian feet could not have been impervious to cactus spines. A great deal of time and skill was expended, therefore, in the devising of footgear. From the days of the Basketmakers, the sandal most in favor had been woven of yucca, the plant with slender swordlike leaves sometimes known as Spanish-bayonet. Yucca is to be found in one species or another throughout the one-time land of the Pueblos. Such intensive use was made of it by the early people that it is almost surprising that it could have survived. As mentioned previously, yucca was the favorite fiber for cordage, and essentially it was cordage which made up the best types of sandals. A twilled weave of small-diameter cords was carefully shaped to the foot, the edges were neatly bound, then lashings to tie around the ankle and over the toes were made to finish the job. A sole of this sort was durable and had remarkable nonskid qualities, as anyone who has worn modern rope-soled shoes can testify. Cruder, more quickly made sandals were plaited together from the unworked blades of the narrow-leaf yucca, the resulting weave looking rather like modern palm-frond matting.

RELIGION. It has been said that “Man cannot live by bread alone.” Nowhere is the truth of this better illustrated than in the history of the Pueblo Indian who, in spite of appalling difficulties to achieve the physical sustenance of life, found much time to develop a spiritual life. The principal evidences of a widespread ancient religion are, of course, the remains of kivas, found in all the old communities. Although details of the use of prehistoric kivas cannot be established, some ideas of their use can be inferred from the part that kivas play in the modern Pueblo religion. The kiva rituals practiced today are traditional in the highest degree, and in all likelihood have descended in their basic form from centuries-old origins.

Hence it is perhaps valid to assume that the following conditions prevailed here at Bandelier 600 years ago: The principal social and religious organization was a society or clan; each such organization had its own kiva; and in their kiva the men of the group conducted ceremonies to honor and propitiate many deities, which were personified in birds and beasts, the elements, and natural forces.

Certain parts of these ceremonies were very likely performed outside the kiva, so that others of the village might also participate—and thus originated the spectacular public dance dramas which visitors nowadays so greatly enjoy at the modern pueblos. Indian dances, as the 20th-century Southwest knows them, are usually short-term public displays of long-term private rituals entailing days of prayer and chanting in the privacy of the kiva. The best known of these Pueblo ceremonies is chiefly a prayer for rain—The Hopi Snake Dance. Others may be prayers for success in the hunt, for productivity of crops, or for healing the sick.

The complexity of the Pueblo religion is increased by the fact that it is indivisibly allied to social and family organization. In the Pueblo scheme of worship, there is not, and seemingly never was, any elite group of “medicine men” or chief practitioners of religion; each person has a part in religious observances, his respective role growing more important as he advances in seniority within a ceremonial organization. With responsibility for the conduct of worship thus placed on all the people, religion is an extremely pervasive force and enters into much of the daily life of each individual.

A CAUTION. In the foregoing attempt to portray the origins and modes of life of the Bandelier dwellers, it has been necessary to generalize and abbreviate to a degree which may occasionally lead a reader astray. Particularly in the matter of dating periods of habitation and migration, it has been impossible to detail the many exceptions to the general chronology. It is suggested that the reader who wishes to investigate further the history of the Pueblo people make reference to the publications included in the list on pages 43-44. These represent, of course, only a small fraction of the written material which exists on the subject. Further publication of new findings will increase our knowledge and alter present-day ideas as the years go by.

_The Natural Scene_

The countryside in and around Bandelier National Monument is wholly forested and even in dry months is cool and green. Lying at an elevation of nearly 7,000 feet, about one-third of the monument receives sufficient rain and snow to support a handsome stand of ponderosa pine. Over the remaining two-thirds of the area, where the slopes are too warm and dry for the big pine, the hardy pinyon pine and the juniper produce the “pygmy forest” growth common in the middle elevations of the Southwest.

CLIMATE. Summer at Bandelier is the shower season. From the first of July until well into September, there is an impressive display of lofty cumulus clouds and thunderheads almost every afternoon. Fortunately for your comfort, these cloud displays do not always result in showers on the monument every day. As is the habit of southwestern thunderstorms, the rains usually cling to the higher peaks, leaving the midelevations cooled but not drenched. The spring and fall are relatively dry seasons, when the skies may remain entirely cloudless for weeks at a time.

In the fall, the great range of temperature from night to day is particularly noticeable; at monument headquarters a difference of 50° between afternoon high and night low is not unusual. This condition is still evident even in midwinter, when the sun may send the thermometer up far above freezing even after a below-zero night. Partly for this reason, the snows of winter at Bandelier are not long-lasting. The usual snowfall of a few inches will quite commonly melt away in a day or so after the sun has returned. Even the snows of blizzard proportions do not interfere for long with access to monument headquarters, for the typical snow of New Mexico is light and dry, easily cleared from the highways.

LIFE ZONES. There is a great variety of herbs, shrubs, and trees within the monument, as a result of the varied terrain and the range of elevation from the bank of the Rio Grande up to the summit of the San Miguel Mountains on the west boundary. Three life zones, or climatic zones, are encountered in traveling the central part of the monument; the Upper Sonoran zone of pinyon and juniper by the river, the Transition Zone of ponderosa pines on the higher mesas, and, highest of all, the Canadian Zone of spruce, fir, and aspen near Boundary Peak. Each of these zones has its characteristic mammals and birds, so that the population of wildlife is likewise varied and extensive.

WILDLIFE. Of the larger animals, the mule deer are most commonly seen, becoming quite bold in Frijoles Canyon, where humans are familiar to them. Black bears are encountered occasionally on the trails in the back country, but are too wary to invade much-traveled areas. The shyest of them all, the mountain lion, leaves his footprints here and there, but is rarely seen. Smaller predators such as coyotes and foxes are numerous, as is the bobcat. These small hunters get most of their living from a large population of rabbits and small rodents such as ground squirrels and wood rats. For the visitor, one of the most popular wild residents is the tufted-eared Abert squirrel, which circulates decoratively through the pines and cottonwoods of the public campground during the summer.

The trees lining the Rito de los Frijoles through the Bandelier campground are a haven for birds as well as squirrels. In some spots, the shrubbery by the stream becomes jungle-thick, making a perfect small-bird habitat. Probably the most common of the Frijoles Canyon songbirds, after the robin, is the black-headed grosbeak. Next in numbers comes the hermit thrush, followed by warblers, vireos, and western tanagers. But the bird most commonly heard in the canyon, and frequently seen around the ruins, is the canyon wren; the melody of his song brings life and brightness to the crumbled walls and the gloomy caves of the vanished people.

During the colder part of the year, the forests of Bandelier become the home of flocks of wild turkeys. These great birds stay high on the Jemez crest during the summer, but come down into the zone of oaks and pinyons to feed on nuts and acorns when the crops ripen in the fall. The turkeys are also very fond of the purple berries of the juniper, as are many other birds and virtually all of the small rodents of the locality.

Down along the Rio Grande, which makes the southeast boundary for the main part of the monument, there is a rewarding variety of plants and animals for those who wish to walk or ride horseback the 3 miles from headquarters. The river at this point is midway in its passage through White Rock Canyon, a roadless stretch of steep walls and boulder-strewn rapids. Here, the fringing willows and cottonwoods are festooned with wild grape vines; these green tangles provide food and shelter for a great community of birds, insects, and reptiles. Flycatchers are everywhere over the river in the summer, taking water-dwelling gnats and insects from the air. Swallows and swifts further the inroads on the insect population. On shore, water snakes and an occasional rattler take the sun and keep watch for the unwary lizard or rodent which will make a next meal.

The river is a major flyway for migrating water birds, and in the course of 12 months a large traffic of ducks, geese, and shore birds may be seen going north or south. There is other wild traffic along the Rio Grande, mostly evidenced by tracks left on the mudbanks and sand bars—mink, beaver, and rarely an otter follow the stream in their water-borne prowlings. The beavers seem to be resident on the monument in White Rock Canyon, although the Rio Grande is too large to allow them to build dams; the unmistakable beaver-tooth pattern on sapling stumps is frequently seen along the riverside. On the headwaters of the Rito de los Frijoles, about 9 miles above monument headquarters, a permanent colony of beavers is established, pioneered long ago by some migrant pair who left the big river to venture up the tiny tributary.

GEOLOGY. The landscape of the Bandelier area is predominantly one of cliffs and canyons; as a visitor to the plateau you will be made conscious of the involved structure and contour of the region in the course of the auto trip over the approach highway. The impression you may get on arrival is of a vast confusion of canyons separated by equally confused mesas and ridges. The topography, however, is not so mixed as first appearance would indicate, for there is a regularity to the pattern of the drainage which becomes apparent from study of a map or aerial photo. The geology, on the other hand, is extremely complex and can be outlined only in general terms in this handbook.

The dominating feature of the landscape is the uplift of the Jemez Mountains, forming the western skyline as one approaches the monument from the east. These mountains are the remains of a great volcano which erupted during the past million years. As seen from a distance, there is very little to suggest a volcano in the profile of the present mountains; only by traveling some 15 miles west of Bandelier into the central valley of the range can the nature of the eruption be visualized. Here is a basin of grassland ringed with forested hills, on a scale so large that its extent is difficult to appreciate. This is the Valle Grande—“great valley” of the Spanish discoverers, who could not have known that they had found one of the largest calderas in the world. Although the Valle Grande now has superficial characteristics of a volcanic crater, there was no single crater here in the days of the eruption—rather a vast dome of a mountain which poured from its flanks such a quantity of lava and other materials that its roof finally fell in. The dimensions of the caldera, a rough oval, are approximately 16 by 18 miles. It is estimated that at least 10 cubic miles of lava and ashes were ejected here to produce the cavity which now exists. The ring of hills around the oval are the remnants of the ancient volcano’s perimeter, which remained elevated after the central areas collapsed.

The volcano, then, played the chief role in fashioning the landscape of the Pajarito Plateau. It provided an uplift of the land at the caldera, by the same means establishing a down-slope from the center outwards, along which the lavas of the eruption avalanched in fire and smoke. Interspersed between the flows of heavy lavas were other avalanches and showerings of volcanic ashes in great depth. When cooled and welded together as they are today, they are called tuff. This process of earth-building went on intermittently for many centuries until the volcano had exhausted its violence and had distributed its many cubic miles of outpourings in encircling deposits around its flanks. With the subsidence of volcanism, the great earth-removing force of erosion became the predominant factor in forming the landscape.

The first rains and snows which fell upon this ancestral uplift found relatively smooth slopes descending outward from the rim of the central caldera. These rains and melted snows began to drain downhill, finding whatever slight channels or irregularities there were in the surface. As the centuries passed, the little water-channels became gullies, then ravines, trending east and southeast through the Bandelier quadrant, down the natural fall-line of the Pajarito slopes. In less than a million years, the plateau has eroded into its present form and the drainage pattern of canyons radiating from the Jemez ridge and emptying into the Rio Grande has become well defined. Such canyons as Frijoles, then, are the products primarily of water erosion, etched into a one-time smooth slope of volcanic deposits.

During the early years of this erosion process, the caldera itself became a lake, entrapping the runoff of waters within its circle. This body of water eventually found an outlet to the south, through the guarding rim of the basin, and in its outflow began the present system of canyons of the Jemez River. A modern example of a caldera containing a lake is to be seen in Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, but the Valle Grande Lake had nearly six times as great an area.

Many of the almost sheer canyon walls of the monument provide good cross sections of the lava and ash deposits exposed in cliffs several hundred feet high. In simplest form, these cross sections reveal at their base a flow of lava or basalt, overlain by perhaps 200 vertical feet of tuff, and capped by another flow of lava forming the rimrock of the mesa-top. In most places, the alternating layers of lava and tuff were deposited several successive times, variously distributed, and complicated by later faulting and interim periods of erosion, so that the interpretation of the rock layers is not everywhere as simple as in the example given above.

One difficulty you may encounter in understanding the makeup of the Pajarito cliffs stems from the very different appearance of the two opposite walls of such a canyon as Frijoles. In the north wall, facing the sun, the cliffs stand bold and somewhat barren; in the south and shadowed wall, there are no prominent cliffs, but rather a rough slope of boulders overgrown with trees and brush. Because of this contrast, it might be difficult for you to realize that the two walls are made up of nearly identical rocks. The difference in appearance is due simply to the difference in exposure. The north wall, hot and dry in the sun and subject to extremes of temperature, has never had a heavy vegetative cover and has eroded into a cliff; the south wall, relatively cool and moist, has been able to support a growth of plants which have held and produced soil sufficient to mask the underlying rocks.

As mentioned earlier, the geology of this locality is complicated to such a degree that the foregoing discussion should be considered as only a general outline. The whole story of the Jemez volcano has not yet been worked out in detail, for the eruptive activity was on a scale so vast and involved such complex forces that geologists are continuing to evolve new concepts as new facts come to light.

_Guide to the Area_

FRIJOLES CANYON. Monument headquarters are at the terminus of the approach road, on the floor of Frijoles Canyon. This center of development is the focal point of activity throughout the year. Listed below are the features of interest to be found in and around the headquarters area; reference to the map on pages 20-21 will help to locate the points mentioned.

1. _Administration Building and Museum._ This building contains a reception information desk manned by park rangers and a lobby from which visitors leave to walk to the ruins. Reference books are available from the monument library on request, and a stock of publications on pertinent subjects is for sale.

The museum occupies a part of the headquarters building. Three rooms of exhibits present Indian artifacts and information on the life and origins of the prehistoric people, and on the modern Pueblo Indians of the vicinity. A visit to the museum is advisable before making a trip to any of the ruins, since the exhibits provide a background against which the ruins are better understood and appreciated.

2. _Tyuonyi Ruin_ lies about 500 yards by trail up the canyon from headquarters. This ruin is one of the principal way-stations on the loop trail over which the trips are routed. Other features on this same loop are an unexcavated ruin, the Big Kiva, Sun House, Cave Kiva, and Long House.

3. _Ceremonial Cave_ is reached by trails either along the Rito or along the north cliffs, approximately 1 mile above headquarters. A walk to this cave is very popular with hikers of modest ambitions, and is particularly rewarding to the photographer. There are a number of tall ladders to climb to reach the cave; consequently, rubber-soled shoes and a degree of caution are recommended.

4. The _Upper Falls_ are downstream from headquarters about a mile and a half. The trail follows the Rito down through some of the handsomest forest glades on the monument, crossing the stream several times. The falls, in a deep lava cleft, are about 80 feet high. The _Lower Falls_, a quarter-mile farther down, are only half as high. Along the trail between the two falls, a geologically interesting exposure of the canyon wall is conspicuous.

OTOWI SECTION. Two large ruins, Tsankawi and Otowi, are the principal features to visit on this detached section of the monument. The main access road from Santa Fe to monument headquarters passes through this section and close to the Tsankawi Ruin. Distance from this ruin to headquarters is 16 miles.

5. _Otowi Ruin_ lies between Pueblo and Bayo Canyons on a disused road. Inquire of a park ranger before attempting to make the trip.

6. _Tsankawi Ruin_ is reached by a spur road and foot trail branching from State Route 4. At the end of the road, a stand contains booklets for the self-guiding trail which leads up onto the mesa to the ruins, a round trip walk of about three-quarters of a mile.

THE BACK COUNTRY. A network of some 50 miles of foot and horseback trails reaches out from monument headquarters into the roadless southern areas of the monument. Hikers and horseback parties frequently make a loop trip of 2 days, visiting the Stone Lions and Yapashi Ruins, and spending the night at Base Camp in Capulin Canyon, where a National Park Service fire guard is on duty during the summer. The return trip may be made past Painted Cave to the Rio Grande, then up White Rock Canyon to Frijoles Canyon and point of beginning.

ADJACENT POINTS OF INTEREST. The _Valle Grande_ is 15 miles west from the Frijoles Canyon checking station, on State Route 4, toward Cuba, N. Mex. This drive across the Jemez ridge cannot be made in the winter, for the road is never cleared of snow.

_Los Alamos_, the atomic city, borders the monument on the north. At the time of this writing (1955), visitors are not allowed to enter the gates of Los Alamos without special passes.

_San Ildefonso_, the modern Indian Pueblo nearest to the monument, will make an interesting side trip when you either enter or leave Bandelier. The village lies one mile north of State Route 4, just east of the Rio Grande. This is the home of Maria Martinez, the woman whose pottery-making skill has won nationwide awards and who was instrumental in reestablishing the production of high-quality pottery in the Rio Grande pueblos.

_How to Reach the Monument_

Bandelier National Monument is 46 miles west of Santa Fe, N. Mex., by way of U. S. 285 to Pojoaque, then left onto State Route 4. Coming from Taos and the north, leave U. S. 285 at Espanola, turning right across the Rio Grande. During the summer, access is possible from the south via Jemez Springs and through the Valle Grande on unimproved gravel roads.

_About Your Visit_

The monument is open every day of the year. The administration building and museum are open daily from 8 a. m. to 5 p. m. (from 8 a. m. to 9 p. m. in summer). Monument literature is available at the reception desk.

Interpretive services include self-guided tours to the principal ruins of Frijoles Canyon. Make application at the reception desk for the booklet and map which describe the walk.

Two other interpretive trails are provided, one visiting the ruins of Rainbow House immediately down canyon from headquarters; the other, in the Otowi Section, climbing to the mesa on which Tsankawi is situated. At the latter place, a booklet will guide you along the trail and tell you the archeological story, point by point.

Each evening from mid-June until Labor Day a program is presented at the administration building by a ranger or archeologist of the monument staff. The subjects of these informal talks range through many fields, from wildlife or botany to Indian ceremonials. Slides or movies are usually shown.

A campground is maintained near headquarters along the Rito de los Frijoles. Campsites are available in the shade of the grove which lines the stream; and fireplaces, tables, and firewood are provided. Housetrailers can be accommodated, and free toilet, shower, and laundry facilities are nearby.

Frijoles Canyon Lodge and Restaurant, directly opposite the administration building, provide excellent accommodations and meals under a concession contract from the National Park Service. The lodge is built of native stone in pueblo architecture, surrounding several landscaped patios; it is one of the more picturesque resorts of the Santa Fe region. The season for these accommodations is May 1 to October 15; no meals or rooms are available in the monument during the balance of the year. For reservations and further information write Frijoles Canyon Lodge, Bandelier National Monument, Santa Fe, N. Mex.