Abe can be a nervous kid, particularly when heights are involved. I understand this, because I can be a nervous grown-up under the same circumstances. But I’m happy to report that, after some initial trepidation, both Abe and I conquered our fears at Bandelier National Monument and climbed the very scary ladders into the cavate cliff dwellings there.
Bandelier National Monument protects a large site with evidence of human habitation going back 11,000 years, as well as the natural areas surrounding it. You don’t get the elaborate cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde here, but more modest dwellings called cavates carved out of soft stone cliffs, along with petroglyphs and ruins of masonry structures. There are a number of farther out, more challenging trails, but we stuck to the offerings near the visitor center, which made for a great, kid-friendly, couple of hours visit.
Bandelier is an easy day trip from Santa Fe; the visitor center is under an hour away, and the town of White Rock, where you can catch a shuttle into the park, is less than forty minutes. We kept going afterwards to see the town of Los Alamos…which meant we didn’t have a ton of time in Los Alamos; you could definitely fill up a full day with each place if you have the time for it.
If you’re visiting in the off season, you can drive right up to the visitor center at Bandelier. If you’re visiting in summer, on the other hand, you’ll need to park in nearby White Rock and take a shuttle if you want to access the site between 9 and 3 (with certain exceptions, like for group tours and for people with handicapped permits). There are other parts of the park that you can drive to any time, but parking is limited at the visitor center, so they’ve settled on this system to avoid having people drive all the way up there only to find no parking available. We found the shuttles to be pretty convenient. They run every 20-30 minutes, there’s plenty of parking in White Rock, and I have happy to have someone else do the driving for the scenic, but pretty narrow and hilly, drive up.
The shuttle is free, but you’ll need to pay for admission to the monument in advance and show your receipt (or your park pass) when you get up there.
At the visitor center, we picked up a junior ranger book for Abe and then headed out on the trail. There’s also a small museum with a lot about the human and natural history of the area. We ended up touring it after the trail, but it would probably make more sense to do it the other way around.
We walked the 1.4 mile Pueblo Loop Trail; this is the most popular trail in the park, and it starts right outside the visitor center. You can also pick up a trail guide for $2 to tell you what you’re looking at as you go. The beginning of the trail is paved and accessible, but not the entire loop. We had our entire group of 11 together on this day, including Abe, who was nine, a mess of teens, four 40-something adults, and my in-laws, and the trail worked well for all of us. I believe Dave’s parents opted to turn around partway through and head back, but the rest of us finished the trail and got a very good taste of the natural and archaeological features of the monument. That said, I hear great things about some of the other trails, so it’s definitely worth devoting more time here if you can.
The trail starts out flat and takes you past some of the ruins and gives you a nice look at the cliff dwellings from a distance before you start to climb and get more up close and personal with the cliffs. There are three places where you can climb ladders (around 12-15 feet high) and go up into the cavates. We happened to be behind a large group of school kids, which made for some long waits for the ladders until they turned around partway through. Abe was actually braver than I was, truth be told. He climbed up every ladder after a bit of hesitation. I held out until the last one, when I finally decided I needed to see the inside of a cavate for myself. I’m good going UP ladders, but going down gets to me…in particular the part where you have to get back on the ladder, going backwards. But it was fine! I did not fall!
There’s a good bit of the trail left after you leave the cliff dwellings behind, winding through the forest before taking you back to the visitors center.
Aside from the museum, the visitor center area has a gift shop and a restaurant where you can get snacks or a light meal. We headed there after our hike for some drinks before we caught the shuttle back to the parking lot.
We ate lunch in the car when we got back to White Rock (there are also some fun sounding restaurants in town, but we opted to save money this time), and by the time we had finished Amy called us about a park with a great view they’d found nearby, so we headed over to the utilitarian-ly named White Rock Overlook Park to meet up with them and take some pictures of cousins and stuff with the Rio Grande in the background. It is, indeed, a great view and worth a quick stop if you’re visiting Bandelier.
And then we made the 15 minute or so drive to Los Alamos, where Amy, Craig, and their kids went to the science museum and we opted for the Los Alamos History Museum. Los Alamos is most well-known as the site of the Manhattan Project, but the museum does a great job of tracing the area’s history well before that, from its early Native American inhabits to its time as a boarding school to WWII and beyond. 
We did not get the sense that the museum was especially interested in grappling with the complex moral and ethical issues surrounding the whole nuclear bombs thing, and, in fact, some of the videos of people who were there talking about the project were a bit on the defensive side.
The museum itself was more extensive than we expected, but the site also has a number of historic buildings, only some of which we had time to check out. The most interesting to me was a house from the Manhattan Project days, with exhibits about the Cold War and also a reconstructed kitchen and living room from the 50s. They also have the house Oppenheimer lived in on site, but it’s currently undergoing renovation and not yet open for tours. But the “what was life like in this secret city?” stuff is fascinating to me.
Thus ends our time in the Santa Fe area, blog-wise (in real life, we still had a couple of days there after this, but I’ve already talked about all that). Next up: Durango, CO and a train!
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