Bandelier National Monument

 Hi everyone. Today I have a travel post for you and no art. Since Monday, I've been spending time in catch up mode at work and still have a huge pile of papers to grade from missing 3 days last week. They will get done, eventually. But I do feel I have to keep chipping away at them, so when I get home, it's late and the studio has been ignore. (Sad face for me.)

But let me show you Bandelier National Monument just outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Bandelier is down in the canyon you can see from above in this top photo.

And then we'll jump down into the canyon floor (well not literally jump).

 These canyon walls were the homes of many ancestral Pueblo people from 1150-1550. The people were farmers and had an active trading life with peoples all the way south to Central America.

They were also great masons and built structures of which you can see the ruins of here.

 But their homes were mostly up along and into these sandstone canyon walls.

 Some of the cavern areas are still there and the National Park Service put in some ladders so you could climb inside. These were fairly low opening and the ladder maybe had 7-8 steps up.

 Here is a reconstruction to show what they would have been like. One thing this doesn't show is how people entered their homes. They would climb up and enter through the roofs.  That way there they could pull up the ladders to help protect them if not so friendly people came into the area. I think the window here was just added so people look inside and see.

  Here's one you can't climb into but if you looks you can see fire staining. These people would have mall fires inside to heat, give light and cook their food.

 The path went up along the cliff face (not all the way to the top). Looking down you can see the remains of a round structure, perhaps a sacred kiva, their religious places that were underground.

 Some more house views.

 And in this photo below, you can see the row of holes were the support logs (called vigas I think) would have been.

 And some fire blackened remains of a ceiling.

 These people would build their rooms one on top of the other.

 You can see these all along the cliff face.

And after viewing these, we took another trail that took us to the high sacred kiva cave. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago in my T day post. Parts of the trail still had a bit of snow.

 And here's a view of the cave from the ground. Its is the large oval dark area on the right.

 Here's some close ups.

I don't like heights but I had to go up and say I did it. Going up wasn't too bad, but going down was really really scary. And I think I mentioned that 2 weeks ago in my T day post. But here's the inside of the cave.

 That round structure coming up is a scared religious kiva. We couldn't go in but you would crawl down through the covered hole on the top .

And here's the hubby and myself. We had some people snap out photo for us.

 Hiking to this cave we also saw a lot of mule deer.

You can tell this is a place where they know they are safe as they were really close and didn't show a lot of fear of people. 

We visited some other sights with a similar (but no the same) idea which I will show you another day.

Hope you enjoyed your visit.