ZR-1 Corvette Road Trip to the Southwest and San Diego

[QB93Z]

Day 28 On Monday we visited Bandelier National Monument, in Los Alamos, NM. The monument preserves the homes and territory of the Ancestral Puebloans of a later era in the Southwest. Most of the pueblo structures date to two eras, dating between 1150 and 1600 AD.





The park's main feature is Frijoles Canyon. The canyon was formed by erosion of layers of volcanic ash about 1000 feet thick, about 1 million years old. The volcanic ash was composed on different materials that eroded and different rates causing a "Swiss cheese" appearance:







Frijoles Canyon contains a number of ancestral pueblo homes, kivas (ceremonial structures), rock paintings, and petroglyphs. Some of the dwellings were rock structures built on the canyon floor; others were cavates produced by voids in the volcanic tuff of the canyon wall and carved out further by humans:











The canyon is home to many different plants and animals. Lyndi got a nice picture of a butterfly we hadn't seen before:





to be continued....