The Land of Enchantment

By Eilene Lyon

My niece came for a visit in late February. I suggested a possible trip to Santa Fe. She countered with a visit to the Meow Wolf art installation there. I booked us into a Fort Marcy Compound condo for two nights.

On our first afternoon, after getting settled into our rooms, we walked down to the plaza in the center of town to have a late lunch at The Shed, my favorite restaurant there for New Mexican cuisine. Afterward, we strolled around downtown, winding up at the State Capitol building.

As we walked, we wandered past the outdoor storage yard of Seret & Sons, where they keep an incredible assortment of old things to put in buildings to give them a foreign or antiquated feel.

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Santa Fe is the oldest state capital city in the U.S., founded over 400 years ago. The statehouse is modern, but also unique. It is the only round Capitol in the country. The house and senate chambers are unremarkable, but each floor is an art gallery, filled with works by contemporary New Mexican artists.

The next morning, we visited Meow Wolf. An artists’ collective created this interactive installation with a mysterious family home inside a warehouse called “House of Eternal Return.” It proved so popular that they have different installations in five cities (more to come).

We spent a couple hours exploring, but Maddie could not get the site app to work, leaving us to try figuring it out on our own. There are various clues to what happened to the missing family who resided in the wacky house. Mostly, I just enjoyed the creativity of it all. (Photos are permitted for personal use only.)

Afterward we drove toward the Jemez Mountains. I’d never been to Bandelier National Monument, or Los Alamos. First, we visited the park, which features cliff dwelling remains. The visitor’s center was open, as well as the gift shop, but we were too early in the season for the restaurant.

There is a path, mostly concrete, which takes you through the canyon bottom about 1.5 miles. The Ancestral Puebloans constructed a round village on the canyon floor, called Tyuonyi. Against the cliffs, they took advantage of natural cavities and built homes that incorporated the small caves.

There are petroglyphs on the cliff walls, but hard to make out from a distance. The park service allows you to enter some of the dwellings by means of ladders. The furthest dwelling from the visitor’s center is Alcove House. To reach it, you must climb four ladders for a combined 140 feet. There is a kiva (round, ceremonial room) and some small caves, but mostly you get a great view of the canyon.

Aside from the trail we took to visit the cliff dwellings, most of Bandelier is wilderness area encompassing around 3,000 archaeological sites. Someday I would like to return and explore some of the backcountry areas. Not far away is the Valles Caldera National Monument that I’d also like to see.

After a visit to the park gift shop, we continued on to Los Alamos, home of the atomic bomb. The Putterer and I had just recently gotten around to watching “Oppenheimer.” Among other inaccuracies about New Mexico in the film is the setting they show for Los Alamos.

From the movie, I had expected the city to lie on a mesa top: flat and covered with sagebrush (though developed since the 1940s). Ha! Los Alamos is anything but flat, and it was never covered in sagebrush. The city is constructed on a series of ridges and canyons that make up the Jemez foothills. The habitat is naturally forested. So much for a realistic depiction by Hollywood.

We came into town via the “back road” closest to Los Alamos National Laboratories. There is a checkpoint where you show your ID (not that they could actually read it from a distance—I was not asked to hand it over), and they inform you no stopping and no photos are permitted as you drive past the labs.

We found a lovely bistro, The Blue Window, where we had a very tasty dinner, then headed back to Santa Fe for the night. Our last morning, before returning to Durango, we visited the St. Francis Cathedral, constructed in the mid-1800s. I’ll write more about that in another post.

Feature image: Kiva and view of Frijoles Canyon from Alcove House at Bandelier National Monument.

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