One Thing Leads to Another

I try to book us into public campgrounds when I can. We have no generator or solar panels so we aren’t able to camp without electricity and in the west that really limits the public campgrounds. Nearly all the Federal camping (National Park, National Forest, Bureau of Land Management) is “dry” camping, no water or electric. I was happy to find a city campground north of Albuquerque that had water and electric so I booked us for four days.

The Coronado Campground was run by the state, but is now operated by the city of Bernalillo. The state still operates the Coronado Historic Site that is adjacent.

The sites aren’t huge, but they are much bigger than most private campgrounds and the shelters are very nice.

Since we were right next to the Coronado Historic Site we decided to go see it. It is the ruins of a pueblo, this one of the Kuaua people, who spoke Tiwi. In the 1930’s an archaeologist came looking for evidence that the conquistador Coronado had been here. Instead he found murals painted on the walls of a square Kiva. The paintings had been done on the adobe, and later more adobe and new paintings applied. There were some 80 layers of painting. Through very painstaking efforts about 30 panels from several layers were preserved. Of these 14 are on display at the visitor center. These murals are the oldest American paintings in existence (not counting pictographs, paintings on canyon walls). Also, the Kiva was reconstructed and a native artist recreated one layer of the murals inside. Bud and I had a wonderful guided tour of all of this, we were the only ones with the docent. Unfortunately you are not allowed to take pictures of the murals or inside the Kiva, so I came away with no photos.

Meanwhile, when I went to purchase our tickets for the site online, they offered a two day ticket that included the Jemez Historic Site. Since that is 41 miles from here, and off up in the mountains, and Matey was allowed there, we decided to do that.

That too is the ruins of an old pueblo, this of the Jemez people (it’s pronounced HEE meesh, the Spanish contributed the spelling).

This also had a reconstructed Kiva, a round one. A Kiva is mostly underground, so you climb up a short ladder, then down a longer one. There is a hearth near the bottom of the ladder. When in use a smoke fire would be burning so when you came down the ladder you would pass through the smoke and be purified. The square structure in front of the descending ladder is a vent. Again, no pictures are allowed inside the Kiva.

Unfortunately almost nothing remained of the pueblo and the site mostly showed the structures of the Spanish mission the natives were required to build.

The largest structure was the church. This was the second one built on the site. The first was built in 1601, but then the Jemez (and other bands) got disgusted with the Spanish and drove them out. In only twelve years they were back and this time the natives were defeated and in 1621 a new and bigger church was built.

In the end about half the Jemez people died. The Spanish priests gathered the remnants at a place about 13 miles further down the canyon. Their descendants still live there, it is Jemez Pueblo and is self-governing.

The tour didn’t take long, we’d brought sandwiches and it still wasn’t lunch time. I looked online for another attraction nearby and found the Soda Dam was just a couple of miles further on.

I don’t know the people walking on top, but they add scale. can you see the river flowing out from under on the right side?

The fleck of white above the white splash is the sunlight coming through the hole along with the water.

We stopped at a fishing access point to eat our lunch.

The canyon was stunning.

This is the Jemez River further downstream from the Soda Dam.

After lunch we started home. Bud noticed a roadside kiosk with information signs and thought it might tell us what kind of fish were in the river. It didn’t, but it did mention something else nearby, so we took a side road.

We entered a very pretty canyon. Both the canyon and the road got narrower as we went up.

Until we were on a one lane road and went through the Gilman Tunnels. There are two short tunnels blasted through the rock in the 1920’s, originally to let a train through for logging.

We parked above the tunnels and got some pictures of the tunnels and the Rio Guadeloupe Gorge.

When we went back down through the tunnels I held my phone out the window to capture the video below.

I love traveling this way; I can’t wait to see what we discover next!