New Mexico

Albuquerque Attractions

The historic and beautiful San Felipe Neri church in Old Town	Another shot of the church	Inside the church with a worshipper
Inside an Old Town chapel	Can you guess which one of these two figures is Our Lady of Guadalupe?
More	chapel	from other angles
Christmas in Old Town Albuquerque by day	Christmas in Old Town Albuquerque by night	OK, "attraction" might be pushing it, but I liked this view inside the Octopus car wash
Silent parking before 5 PM?	University of New Mexico	The campus is located downtown

Get Your Pix On Route Sixty-Six

Route 66 was immortalized in the 1980s group Depeche Mode's song of the same name. That was a cover from the 1960s? No! By Bobby Troup, the guy who played Dr. Early on TV's Emergency!? Really?

Even if you didn't grow up watching Emergency! or listening to New Wave, it's still possible to feel the magical appeal of this road. For travellers in Chicago where Route 66 originated, it was the passage to the promised land, the American West.

Today Route 66 has been turned into city streets, paved over by the interstates or relegated to the sidelines as the frontage road. Oh the tragedy! But in some parts of New Mexico, the old road survives.

Guess where the Route 66 Diner is in Albuquerque?	This "blurry" pictures captures the frenzied essence of Route 66. OK, OK, I snapped this while driving.	La Puerta Motel
The Owl Cafe is on Eubank Boulevard, not Route 66, but its neon sign is a hoot!	Inside the Owl Cafe is a diner's delight!

Turquoise Trail

Sure, I-25 is faster for travelling from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. But the Turquoise Trail is way more interesting as it curves through the pinon- and juniper-starred foothills. This back road connects San Antonito, Golden, Madrid and Cerillos, historic mining towns that were once abandoned.

These former ghost towns have been resurrected as a growing population moves in. Rusted mining shacks have been cleaned up and turned into houses. New housing developments have sprung up.

	The white adobe church in Golden comes with a cemetery.
But it's really pretty!
	Sometimes you have to wait your turn before taking a photo.
But it's worthwhile!
	Down the road from the church, the Golden Merchandise store sells high-quality, beautiful Indian jewelry and pottery.
A September 11 memorial in Madrid.

Santa Fe and Nearby

	Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel is famed for its legendary miraculous staircase, which was built without nails and by a mysterious man with no name. It's pretty.
The Sanctuario de Chimayo is famed for its soil, which reputedly has healing powers
	More Chimayo
Las Trampas
	Las Trampas
On the road to Taos
	Won't you try to cheer up this cafe on the road to Taos?

Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier National Monument is very nice indeed.

Bandelier National Monument is very nice indeed.

Bandelier National Monument is very nice indeed.

Bandelier National Monument is very nice indeed.

Bandelier National Monument is very nice indeed.

Checking out the view from inside the cliff dwelling at Bandelier	What's outside: a view of the kiva ruin	At Tsankawi, the trail means climbing down this ladde	This long, long ladder
The trail down the ladder leads to this cave dwelling
This trail through the rock is shallow here	but gets deeper	much deeper	This ancient trail was created by the Anasazi Indians who lived here centuries ago
Judging from how narrow it is, people were smaller then!

Pecos National Historic Park

You can find ancient Indian ruins and Spanish churches in many places in New Mexico, but at Pecos, they pop up in the same park. An occasional rock wall and some exposed kivas are the most visible signs of a Pueblo Indian town of some 2,000 people.

Spanish conquerors arrived to convert and colonize in the 1500s. The remains of the church they built look like a fortress, perhaps because it's a replacement for the one destroyed by the Indians in the Pueblo revolt of 1680.

What's down there in the kiva?	This!	The Spanish adobe church	A church doorway glows	The Plaza Hotel in nearby Las Vegas, New Mexico

An easy hike takes you into a slot canyon where the walls get closer and closer to you. The other goes to an overlook of the tent rocks.

Tent Rocks became Kasha-Katuwe ("white cliffs" in Keresan) National Monument in January 2001.

	Tent Rocks
The slot canyon at Tent Rocks

Three Rivers Petroglyph Site has over 20,000 Indian rock art images carved into the volcanic rocks that lie scattered on a gradual rise of a hill. Some of the petroglyphs are as old as 1,000 years old. The rock art is thought to have been made by members of the Mogollon tribe.

The petroglyphs include numerous circles and geometric shapes. Some of the human and animal figures are carved with decorated, geometric bodies.

	Another one bites the dust
These mysterious circles are obviously signs of UFOs! Or the sun.
	An animal with a decorated body.
A figure with splayed limbs. Is it a man? Animal? Or Manimal?

Chock o' Chaco

"When you leave Chaco," said the park ranger in his talk, "it will be one of the saddest times of your life." Definitely one of the most mysterious and intriguing places I've ever been, Chaco Canyon holds a number of huge ancient ruins built by Indians starting in the 800s.

Most ruins here used to be great houses built with as many as hundreds of rooms. Some researchers say Chaco used to be a city of the Anasazi Indians who flourished here in the Four Corners area. But some disagree. Pointing to a relatively small amount of trash and buried bodies found at Chaco, such researchers argue that very few people actually lived here.

So why build Chaco? And how?

Not only that, but linear roads 30 feet wide originating from Chaco have been detected by NASA. Instead of conforming to the land's features, these prehistoric roads are absolutely straight.

Doorways ...	...at Pueblo Bonito...	...look bigger...
...than they really are!	But the Pueblo Bonito ruin is no illusion. It's really grand!
The west side of Pueblo Del Arroyo...	...has a unique three-walled kiva	...and another kiva on the inside!
Pueblo del Arroyo ruins are well-preserved...	...despite being built on an arroyo
The chief attraction of Casa Rinconada is this giant kiva.	I said, the chief attraction is the kiva!	Wonder if this is where they held gladiator fights? (It's that big.)
Near Penasco Blanco, this pictograph is painted on a cliff overhang.	It's thought to represent the supernova of 1054.
Even though it's a 6.5-mile round trip hike to Penasco Blanco, there's always a pesky tourist taking photos of everything!	Want a room with a view?	Penasco Blanco's got one for you!
This local was as scared to see us as I was! Luckily for me, it's a non-poisonous bullsnake.	This gorgeous claret cup cactus near the Una Vida ruin is part of Chaco's flora
This panel of Anasazi rock art is located high on the cliff near the Una Vida ruin	These petroglyphs are located on the trail to Penasco Blanco
Fajada Butte can be seen from Hungo Pavi	Chetro Ketl has another big kiva	The enormous flat round rocks supported beams that held up the kiva roof

Aztec Ruins

I confess, I really like Aztec ruins. I may like it even more than Chaco Canyon, which lies just over an hour away. Chaco Canyon is on an immense, incomprehensible scale but Aztec is the first ancient Indian ruin site where I get a sense that people actually lived here.

A stone metate, used for grinding corn into flour, lies on the floor of one room. Across the way, a door hanging woven from willow remains. And in one room, early anthropologists found the remains of several bodies.

Built by Anasazi Indians in the late 1000s and eventually abandoned in the 1300s, these ruins are located close to the Animas river banks. And despite the name, the ruins have nothing to do with the real Aztecs. Nineteenth-century white settlers mistakenly thought whoever built the ruins was linked to the Aztecs in Mexico. The nearby town of Aztec took its name from the ruins, and it's been named that way ever since.

Aztec seem to be the most charming of the three towns in the northwest corner of New Mexico, more than nearby Bloomfield and the bigger town of Farmington. Plus, how can you resist a town that proudly holds an annual Aztec UFO event as a library fundraiser?

Whistler's Mother at Aztec Ruins	Just like at Chaco, the builders at Aztec really liked doorways	Really, really liked them
Look closer and you'll find someone still lives at Aztec	Or just another tourist!	Or two!
Outside the big kiva	Inside, the big kiva has been restored	Yet another kiva

Shiprock in New Mexico means two things: the town and the rock. Shiprock is the name of the town on the Navajo reservation in northwestern New Mexico and Ship Rock is the name of the rock. Or maybe it's the other way round.

We start the long drive to Shiprock that morning from Albuquerque. After dallying too long in Santa Fe, we head northwest. We find the previously small town of Espanola has grown into a metropolis with its very own multiplex cinema, the highway filled with middle-aged bikers going the opposite direction from us, and the road to Abiquiu (also known as Georgia O'Keefe-Ville) to contain the most awesomely beautiful scenery: "layers of red and orange and white and purple rock rising out of the earth to form cliffs" (from my travel journal).

North of Abiquiu, New Mexico sheds its desert skin, revealing its evergreen forests and wide, green meadows. Eventually we return to the desert as we near Shiprock. A dust storm engulfs us. By the side of the road, little kids pedal their tricycles looking like ghosts in the storm. Once we emerge from the dust, golden sunlight lights up the cliffs in the distance and a double rainbow stretches over Navajo land.

And here is our pot of gold.

Ship Rock at sunset	A close up of Ship Rock	Another view of Ship Rock

Bisti and De-na-zin Wilderness

Want to know what it's like to walk on the moon and can't afford the $20 million space shuttle ride? New Mexico has just the thing!

The Bisti landscape is so unlike anything else I've seen, the best I can do is describe it as an alien landscape. Its closest cousin in terms of looks, Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, doubled as an alien planet in the movie Galaxy Quest. In contrast to the park, Bisti is immense.

And it's completely isolated.

There are no real trails, so we head northeast for 30 minutes, cross two barbed-wire fences and find a shallow valley of hoodoos. Doubling back and heading east along the dried-up river bed for 45 minutes takes us to an immense valley of hoodoos and sculpted rocks.

The 70 million-year-old rock formations here date to the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. In fact, fossils have been found of the plant-eating, duck-billed parasaurolophus, meat-eating albertosaurus.

Bisti hoodoos can be tall	far and away	or small
shaped like toadstools	or T-shaped	or long and low
In Bisti, you'll find lots of them!	Lots and lots in this valley of the hoodoos!	How'd they get that way? Well, it can't be from water erosion.
	Steve looks out for Karl
De-na-zin has loads of ancient petrified logs	Sunset at De-na-zin	De-na-zin denizen: Not all New Mexico residents are happy to see us!

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