From One House to Another
I never considered how Bandelier National Monument got its name until a week after I'd left the abandoned cliff dwellings, the time-defying petroglyphs, the impressively preserved ruins, and one harrowing climb to an ancient housing complex that I wisely sat out.
Despite these New Mexico lands serving as home to ancestral Pueblo people for millennia, once the cliffs and canyons joined the U.S. parks system, government officials chose to honor Adolf Bandelier, a Swiss immigrant and self-taught archeologist who studied this region and played a role in its establishment as a national monument to preserve the sites. That was in 1916 after the place had been vacated some 400 years prior by the indigenous populations that made a decent life out of honoring the elements surrounding them.
A brochure you receive at the gate includes a message from the Affiliated Pueblo Committee:
Spiritually, our ancestors still live here at Bandelier. You see reminders of their presence here--their homes, their kivas, and their petroglyphs. As you walk in their footsteps, value the earth beneath you and show everything the same respect we do when we re-visit this sacred place.
We walked about four miles in those ancestral footsteps, mostly along a concrete-turned-dirt footpath that did not exist then but now allows more than the able-bodied to enjoy the sandstone spires and remains of an entire civilization that used ingenuity and natural resources to build community.
The main loop will take you to the Long House, an 800-foot stretch of what constituted condo living back in the day. It's really a marvel to witness and accessible compared to the other big attraction another half-mile away: Alcove House. To see the viga holes and niches of 25 ancestral homes, you must climb 140 feet straight up. There's a warning sign that those with health problems or a fear of heights should go no further. I knew I could get up to the caves, but I couldn't risk vertigo striking while coming down. So I watched my two friends and all who followed them (which, based on my calculations, was only 35% of those who passed me waiting on a log). As one woman my age who changed her mind told me on her way back, "With age, comes wisdom."
After stopping in the gift shop, we decided on lunch in White Rock, the only town of significance along our route and only because it houses many of the people who work at nearby Los Alamos National Labs. It is lost on no one that land still serving as a spiritual center is just miles from the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
If Bandelier offered peace and quiet, our next stop did the opposite. We pre-purchased tickets for Meow Wolf, a funky art installation that made me grateful I don't drink or do drugs because otherwise I might still be trying to find my way out.
Located on the outskirts of Santa Fe proper, this Meow Wolf (there are others in Texas, Denver and, of course, Las Vegas) has a permanent exhibit called House of Eternal Return in which nothing is as it seems and every nook, cranny and secret doorway leads you into labyrinthine hallways and corridors with kaleidoscopic hues. With the threshold between imagination and tangible art on display, wanderers are plunged into the otherworldly creativity that is, quite frankly, hard for me to describe at the moment.
There's a riddle to solve in the main section of the house itself, but I was already through the fridge and into a space ship before I could comprehend what was happening.
