7-26-2018 Santa Fe, NM

View out the cockpit window of Bee

Looking down the street
at the hail storm

It was a comfortable short drive from Taos to Santa Fe, a town that we really kinda like.  We arrived at the RV park just in time for the afternoon squall and it was a storm on roller skates.  High winds, thunder, lightning, rain and hail in buckets hammering on our roof and making confetti out of the bathroom skylight.  The rest of the night, it rained and hailed IN the bathroom, which was strewn with beach towels, the only real option at that point.  So OK, God had set the agenda for the following day, preferably in the morning before the daily afternoon squall.  As luck would have it, the RV parts store carries the exact skylight we needed and by 10:30 AM, it was in place and all is well.

The casualty:  the bathroom skylight

By the way, after we left Fountain, CO it was hit by a near gale.  The mud slides took out the road that we drove into the mountains to visit Vicki and Bob.  Vicki sent us a picture of people shoveling 6 inches of hail off of the sidewalks.  The good karma gods were watching out for us because we escaped just in time.  The locals were not so fortunate.  What a mess!  Time to gear up to evacuate “Monsoon Alley,” the sooner the better!

Administrative duties were on the schedule for some of the time in Santa Fe but there is always time to explore a little.  I could not learn much about Camel Rock except that it looks a lot like a camel.  In 2017, his nose broke off but he still looks a lot like a camel.  He sits on the Tesuque Pueblo land and it may be that he had some spiritual significance but I could not learn much about it.

Picture of Camel Rock taken before 2017
plagiarized from the web.  He has his nose.

My picture.  Camel Rock with a nosectomy

On to what I consider the highlight of the day:  The Bandelier National Monument.  It is named for Adolph Bandelier, a research anthropologist who tramped all over the west studying the culture of native western people.  He was guided by the Cochiti tribesmen to their ancestral homes in Frijoles Canyon.  They lived, 11,000 years ago, in caves on the sheer cliffs, caves that were carved out of the soft volcanic rock by the wind and the rain.  (The volcanos, two of them that occurred a few million years ago, were 600 times the intensity of Mr. St. Helens and left behind soft volcanic rock 1,000 ft. deep, called “tuff.”  The tuff from these volcanos has been found as far away from this location as Nebraska, Iowa and Texas.)  The village itself in the canyon was a circular affair with many rooms and a courtyard and three kivas, circular rock-lined pits in the ground where political and religious ceremonies were held.  Many of the citizens lived in the caves up in the cliffs where it was cooler, though, accessible by paths and ladders.  They were hunters and gatherers, living from the generosity of the land.  It was a 2 mile path for us and we did it, including the ladders into the caves.  Some were actually suites where a person can stand up, walk into adjacent rooms and look out through naturally-formed windows.  The ceilings are charred black.  We learned that they did this on purpose.  It baked the dusty silicon sand into a hard layer that protected the cave from being filled with an incessant sand dune.  An enterprising bunch, these Indians of 11,000 years ago.

Porous "tuff" cliffs.  The Indians lived
in the holes (which are actually caves)
11,000 years ago.

Caves with ladder (ladder is not original equipment)

Remnants of the village

Scientists' rendering of what the village
may have looked like when
it was occupied

Rob and Lindy in the cave

Lindy looking out the bedroom window

The Bradbury Museum is in the heart of Los Alamos.  I thought Los Alamos would be some kind of museum of bunkers, you know, “This is where Oppenheimer slept,” kind of thing.  But it was nothing like that.  There is a visitor center and a kind of museum and science center where kids can push buttons to challenge various experiments.  Not exactly what we were expecting and pretty chaotic in its presentation.  We learned a lot from reading the endless plaques, miles of them, but after a while we were burned out.  However, there's this:  Los Alamos has a population of 18,000, 10,000 of whom work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory which has one of the highest concentrations of PhDs in the world.  So if you are interested in living in a geeky town full of Sheldon Coopers, this is the place for you!

We thought we’d have the pleasure of experiencing the Spanish and Mexican cuisine of Santa Fe but, alas, the vicious squalls kept us in lock-up in Bee.  Time to get out of here.