December 16, 2020
The town of Los Alamos lies upon the slopes of a living supervolcano called the Valles Caldera, at a crisp High-Desert elevation of 7,300 feet above sea level. The modern town is barely a century old, but the nearby cliff villages were built more than a thousand years earlier by the Tewa, who carved homes into the caldera’s cliffs Bandelier Tuff, the chalky volcanic stuff is called, in honor of the archaeologist Adolph Bandelier’s work here in the late 1800s.
You can walk among these skull-eyed cliff dwellings preserved since 1916 within Bandelier National Monument and appreciate the then-novel approach of Bandelier, who combined “historical research, folklore, mythology, native traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, and archaeology” in an early effort to remove European-American assumptions about New World culture, as so much more can be discovered with an open mind.
The six, entrance fee-free days for 2021 will be:
Monday, January 18 – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Saturday, April 17 – First Day of National Park Week
Wednesday, August 4 – Great American Outdoors Act anniversary
Wednesday, August 25 – National Park Service Birthday
Saturday, September 25 – National Public Lands Day
Thursday, November 11 – Veterans Day
Campground fees still apply on all designated fee-free days. Bandelier normally charges $25 per vehicle, $20 per motorcycle, and $15 per individual. The full suite of America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass are available for those who love to visit public lands. The Bandelier Annual Pass is available for $45. These passes are great options and allow unlimited entrance to more than 2,000 federal recreation areas, including all national parks – some for one year, others for a lifetime.
Snyder: An Ancestral Pueblo Site In The Middle Of Town - 7:30 am
This photo accompanied the 1959 article in the LASL Community News and shows the fenced area. The boys and their dog are Dick Lilienthal, 12; Dick Baker, 10; Chip Lilienthal, 10; and Shag, Courtesy/LASL Community News
View of the Fire Cache and surroundings as they look today. The pueblo ancestral ruins have undergone two renovations. One was done in 1959 and a second reconstruction in the early 2000s. Photo by Sharon Snyder
By SHARON SNYDER
Los Alamos Historical Society
I’ve walked past the Ancestral Puebloan site in our historic district often since I moved back to Los Alamos in 2014, and I’ve sometimes wondered why I never noticed it when I was growing up here in the late 1950s and 1960s. Then, while doing research in our archives one afternoon, I noticed a story and photograph on the front page of the LASL Community News of Aug. 13, 1959. The picture showed that the pueblo remnants w