Bandelier Wilderness

From the twelfth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, a large population of Ancestral Pueblo people flourished among the cream-and-tan cliffs and piñon-juniper-forested mesas on the slopes of the Jemez Mountains. When the people moved on, they settled in villages along the Rio Grande known today as Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe and San Ildefonso Pueblos. Their present-day descendants maintain close traditional ties with the dwellings on the mesa tops, cliffs and canyon bottoms throughout Bandelier National Monument, seventy percent of which is designated wilderness. The setting is dramatic — sheer-walled canyons dividing the long mesas of the Pajarito Plateau. The best-known sites are found along an easy self-guiding trail in Frijoles Canyon, just behind the Visitor Center. With 70-plus miles of trails and elevations from 5,300 feet at the Rio Grande to over 10,000 feet at the top of Cerro Grande, Bandelier offers a variety of scenery and habitats, and hikers will inevitably encounter challenging terrain, sweeping mesa tops, lush canyons and isolated archeological sites. Hiking choices vary in distance and difficulty: four miles one-way to the 600-foot-deep gorge of Alamo Canyon; six miles one-way to the ancestral pueblo of Yapashi; a 22-mile loop to Painted Cave in Capulin Canyon; about seven miles one-way to the densely forested upper part of Frijoles Canyon, repeatedly crossing El Rito de los Frijoles (Bean Creek). Two westbound trails leave the Monument to enter Dome Wilderness.